How My Village Fell Apart (and rose again) Last time, I was so excited to see the watercolor village come alive, finally — roofs, fences, a goose somewhere in the background pretending to help. It looked lovely. It felt right... It was completely wrong. At least from a level design perspective. After finishing that pretty layout, I finally put Zoti inside it. And I instantly realized that it was not playable =( Walking across the scene was just too long (35 seconds). The distances and pacing did not make sense once I viewed it through a player’s eyes instead of an artist’s. I had drawn the detailed version before understanding the functional one. That’s the mistake. So, to not fall into the same trap twice, I went back to the design basics instead of immediately redrawing everything: Experimented with how long it takes to cross the screen at normal speed until a sensible time was found Drew new bounding boxes to see how puzzle sequences might flow Tested ideas right on the sketch. Bas