I originally read about the book “Level Up!” by Scott Rogers from his Blog, Mr Boss’ Design Lair. While the book is not out yet, and thus I cannot speak about how good it actually is or not, I must say I am quite excited about this book (Which is surprising, because I cannot remember a time in all my life that I have been excited for ANY book to be coming out!). In short, the book is about how to be a game designer, and how to design games to make them enjoyable to the user. Sounds good, right? The link to preorder it can be found here. Preorder it if you are as excited for it as I am!
At any rate, while googling for this book, I found a flash game called Level Up! (It can be found here. Go play it, before I accidentally spoil something :-D) In this game, your abilities level up as you use them. I had been thinking about making a game similar to this for quite some time, though I was planning on doing it to a space shooter game, where the weapons you use would level up as you use them, as would your ship’s agility, defense, etc.
I thought this leveling up mechanic was cool, and very much enjoyed the start of the game. However, (Spoilers coming…), at the end of a day in the game (About 5-10 minutes of playing), all of the levels for your abilities reset to level 1 if you lose to a boss creature, who is near impossible to beat without abilities that can be purchased throughout the game with crystals (Collectibles). That being said, any abilities that you purchase throughout the game stay with you, as well as remaining crystals at the end of the day. Also, if you lose this fight, all of the crystals reappear throughout the level, allowing you to collect them many times.
All in all I would say this is a pretty fun game, however, my roommate had a very different experience while playing through the game, and had a different view on the game.
Paul Kankiewicz 