Ah, I'm not a big idea of the fan of self-adjusting difficulty. I always want to have the same challenge as everyone else on a particular difficulty level. I don't want to have the game patrionise me by making itself easier if I'm not any good!

Actually I've thought about trying to put in a built-in level editor of some description. All that'd need to be done is to be able to define the number of spawns, the type of enemies that are spawned, the doors used etc.

I think I've seen you share a few of those China Smack articles on GReader.

Yeah. Chinasmack has some really interesting articles. I like the viewpoints that they provide at the bottom.

Rather the game insult you by saying you're not good enough? :P Or forcing you to own up to your meakness? :P

How would that level editor work?

Yes, I'd rather the game be open and honest with me about my lack of skill. So I can be open and honest to others when I actually manage to beat the damn thing that I did it legitimately.

The level editor would really just be a matrix describing four bits of information about each enemy in each level - What type of enemy, which door the enemy comes from, when the enemy comes from that door and does he have a key.

Given the mangatude of platforms you have released the game for, how would you handle the "level" files?

Hmmm. It's.. kind of tricky. I'd probably have the "default" levels hardcoded somewhere, and use HTML5's local storage to store user "overwritten" levels. (This would also make it easy to roll back to the default game if you make a mistake). Probably something similar for the native C++ build.

Edit - Meant to say, I may not actually do an editor this year. Next year's re-releases may focus on editability (as well as online multiplayer etc).

Maybe make it refer to a website, so it actually downloads the levels?

I think that's technically possible but I'm not sure why you'd want to do that? If I was going to go through the hassle of making it so that users could save levels online, wouldn't it be better to implement a database backend for storing the level data?

True. Depends if you want the users storing the levels on your server or not I supose. -- And if you want to expose your DB to potential overflow/abuse. I guess you could just use google apps engine.

Heh, a friend of mine set up a database to manage high scores for a game he did. Unfortunately he quickly found that people could just use a memory editor to set their score to 9,999,999... (Solving the problem though was just as easy, he changed it so the high score in memory was offset by another random variable, so finding it in memory is next to impossible).

Wow. Memory editors... His game must attracted sophisticated players? .. Or he wrote it in something with a debugger that can be applied on to anything.

I think it was just a standard java web app - the game is Attack of the Meeplings.

The attack probably wasn't that complex. There are memory editors available for the purpose of cheating, and I presume one of those was used for this. They work along these lines:

1. Type the current value of the variable you want to find into the editor (Say, 100 if you have 100 points)
2. All of the memory for the application is searched, and a (massive) list of addresses that could be pointing to the variable are produced.
3. Change the value of the variable (say, increase your score to 200) and then enter this into the editor.
4. The previous list is reduced, repeat until there's only one address left that could be holding that number.
5. Edit the address and set the value to whatever you like.

Hrm. Interesting. I guess it would make sense for someone to have written a program to do that. I guess program memory snapshots would help considerably with the reduction of the massive list.