If you've been playing games for some time (doesn't matter if klik or professional games), you might have noticed that there are games that just don't stop being fun, and that there are games that are looking awesome for the first few minutes but just get boring afterwards. Why is it like this? If there's a game with a good engine and cool graphics, shouldn't it just be fun? Well, it doesn't have to be this way.

Let's get two examples: Half Life and Serious Sam. Both are first person shooters, both have a solid engine - but one of them is much more well-known. Why didn't get Serious Sam as famous as Half Life? There are probably several reasons, but the most obvious one should be the level design: Serious Sam was basically about entering a room, killing all the enemies inside it, entering the next room, killing all enemies again and start again from the first point. Half Life told a story - and it was designed just like a movie. There were scripted events all over the levels, so the player was really busy just seeing what was going on around him.

After all, it is probably way to extravagant to create a game like HL with a klik product - but we still can learn from the big ones to make our games more interesting, so here we go with some things you should keep in mind when designing your levels:

1. Keep the player busy
This means, don't let him get bored. If nothing happens, he'll probably think that he has already passed the climax of your game so there's no more reason to keep playing. Give him big levels to explore, riddles to solve and always new challenges.

2. Reward the player for playing your game
Add some nice cutscenes, new weapons, a highscore table, some new enemies or whatever. This will motivate the player to keep playing your game because he always thinks that he is probably going to see or get something better than before in your game.
The player also has to realize that he was rewarded. If he gets a new weapon that was just lying on the ground (so it was hardly possible NOT to pick it up) or is just busy doing something different, so he doesn't even notice that he has gotten something special, he doesn't really feel rewarded.

3. Never frustrate the player
This is VERY important and can be easily avoided by using a save or password function. Of course, this is only important for longer games, but I bet that this is the most important point there. No player wants to start a game all over again after having it played for hours just because of having made one stupid mistake.

4. Make your game look professional
There are two reasons for the people to play a klik game: because it's good or because of compassion. However, there are too many games around that would have to be played because of compassion - and after all, those games won't be played for too long, because it's just more fun to play a game that really seems to be professional. All right, this last point isn't that easy to fulfill, but I never said it would be. Never use quick backdrops, gradiants or something like that. Most klikkers know tools like Terragen or Poser, so they definitely know what was hard to create and what was not.
If you really put effort into your games, people will see and honor this. Doesn't matter what and how you do - but do it with love and time.

So these points are what I think is important - and now we know why Serious Sam did not become famous: It didn't keep the player busy, because although there were always lots of enemies, it was always the same and so the player got bored. And often, the player got killed because there were just too many enemies, so although there has been a save function, it took sometimes several attempts to pass a special place - this was frustrating for many players. However, there were many cool weapons and enemies and it looked sometimes really awesome - but this just wasn't enough to beat those games at the top.

After all, all I wanted to say with this little article is: Don't create a cool engine and build a crappy game around it. It's sometimes hard, especially when your levels are made up of small tiles, to create many big, cool levels that always offer something new to the player when he finished one - but this is probably more important than you think, so take your time with this.