Game Overview
Game: Petalnuat
Role: Level Designer of Level 2,3
Editor: Unity
Team Size:5
Genre: Top Down View RPG, Puzzle Solving
“Petalnaut” is an action-packed twin-stick shooter game, set in a sci-fi world on a distant
planet. As the adorable yet deadly Petalnaut, you must collect the alien flowers scattered
throughout this planet to provide oxygen for your habitat and make a home in the depths of
space.
However, these flowers are fiercely guarded by hordes of evil robots who will do
anything to keep you from bringing them back to your home base.
Game Trailer
Create a Clear Difficulty and Skill Progression
Build Levels 2 and 3 as the middle stages of the game’s difficulty curve, expanding on mechanics introduced in the tutorial level.
Introduce more demanding enemy types, including Burst Ranged, Kamikaze, and Sniper enemies.
Gradually increase combat complexity by combining different enemy behaviors instead of relying only on larger enemy counts.
Give players opportunities to demonstrate mastery of movement, aiming, dodging, shielding, and ability switching.
Level 2 introduces Burst Ranged and Kamikaze enemies, while Level 3 increases the emphasis on Snipers and multi-wave arena combat.
Design Readable and Varied Twin-Stick Combat Encounters
Create combat spaces that support constant movement, directional aiming and fast reactions.
Use arena layouts to control enemy waves and give each encounter a clear beginning, escalation, and conclusion.
Combine open combat areas with narrower hallways to create different forms of spatial pressure.
Use cover, environmental obstacles and room geometry to help players manage ranged attacks.
Vary enemy placement and attack directions to prevent encounters from becoming predictable or repetitive.
Level 3 contains several two-wave battle arenas and a dedicated Sniper hallway that requires players to approach carefully.
Balance Combat, Puzzles, and Oxygen-Driven Pacing
Use oxygen as a constant source of urgency without interrupting the player’s ability to explore and understand each space.
Place oxygen refill stations between major challenges to function as soft checkpoints and pacing breaks.
Integrate puzzles into the main route so they test the player’s understanding of abilities rather than feeling disconnected from combat.
Require players to use the Beam, Gravity Well, movable objects, pressure plates, breakable walls, and targets in increasingly complex combinations.
Alternate intense combat encounters with short puzzle and recovery sections to create a more varied gameplay rhythm.
In Level 2, players solve Beam and Gravity Well puzzles before opening a shortcut back to the base. Level 3 reinforces this structure with a more advanced Gravity Well and pressure-plate puzzle between its combat arenas.
Postmortem
What Went Well
Designed Levels 2 and 3 with a clear difficulty progression, moving from introducing advanced enemy types to testing the player through more demanding combat encounters.
Created varied pacing by alternating combat, ability-based puzzles, oxygen refill stations and recovery spaces.
Used different spatial layouts, including open arenas, narrow hallways and shortcut routes, to support distinct enemy behaviors and gameplay situations.
Reinforced previously introduced mechanics such as the Beam, Gravity Well, Shield and Dodge without overwhelming the player with too many new systems at once.
What Went Wrong
Some difficulty increases were too sudden, especially around the Kamikaze introduction and the more complex Gravity Well puzzles.
Level 3 relied heavily on repeated two-wave arena encounters, which reduced gameplay variety and made parts of the level feel structurally similar.
Certain puzzle objects, pressure plates and shortcut routes could have used stronger visual guidance to communicate their relationships more clearly.
Some combat spaces did not provide enough recovery time between enemy encounters, puzzles and oxygen-management pressure.
Even Better If
Conduct more playtests earlier to identify difficulty spikes, unclear puzzle communication and repetitive encounter patterns.
Introduce dangerous enemies individually before combining them with other enemy types in later rooms.
Give each battle arena a more distinct objective, such as surviving for a set time, using environmental hazards or protecting a specific area.
Improve visual guidance through stronger landmarks, color coding and sightlines around movable objects, targets, pressure plates and shortcuts.