Level Length Research (Platformer)

How long does it take before a player feels a platformer level is too lengthy? The answer is very subjective to the players. Here's a simple Youtube research that I conducted on how long it takes to finish one classical platformer level:

• Jungle King (1982 Atari 2600), 45 seconds. Link
• Congo Bongo (1983 Atari 2600), 1 minute 54 seconds. Link
• Super Mario Bros. (1985 NES), 1 minute 15 seconds. Link
• Super Mario World (1990 SNES) 39 seconds. Tested.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (1991 Sega Genesis), 29 seconds. Link
• Prince of Persia (1992 NES), 2 minutes, 38 seconds. Link
• Donkey Kong Country (1994 SNES), 1 minute 34 seconds. Link

Some platformer games have a time limit, therefore that's the maximum time to complete the level and the minimum time is the fastest time that level can be completed, roughly. The goal is to find out a time range between the time limit and the minimum time that we can use to design the length of a platformer level. Not too long, not too short, nice balance.

Here's our first hypothesis:
A level must be completable within a minimum time of 1~2 minutes.


Therefore if a player takes shorter than 1 minute to complete a level, its too short. Before we continue, lets list down the factors that influences the time it takes to finish a platformer level:

Internal factors that we can control (in game)

1. Level length (from start to end for one level)
2. Character movement speed (acceleration, deceleration, dash, etc)
3. Level difficulty (enemies, puzzles, platforms)

External uncontrollable factors (the environment and culture, player)

1. Player's personal experience (pattern recognition, game mastery, reflexes)
2. Player's goal and motivation (exploration, completion, perfection, achievement, competition)

How do you balance everything to fit our first hypothesis? Through thorough testing. Once you get the feeling right, internal factor 2 and 3 above will become your constant to modify internal factor 1. Now back to discussion, we know what is too short for a platformer level from our first hypothesis. But what is too long?

In Super Mario Bros and Super Mario World, there is a 400 second countdown limit for each level. Because of this constrain, players are motivated to complete the level within the time frame. The only drawback is no perfection (to get every coin, to find hidden blocks, to try entering every pipe) because players don't have the luxury of time to do all that.

In Sonic the Hedgehog, the timer starts from 0 instead, thus removing the constrain and encourage players to explore and find hidden rings and bonus game portals. The drawback is sometimes player explore too much and lost track of time and position, in other words, lost.

Games like Donkey Kong Country do not have any time constrains. Players can explore all they want and try to achieve perfection by collecting all the bananas and balloons.

Too long will cause the player to get frustrated either because of repetitiveness, linearity or difficulty and makes them wonder is there an ending? There is no real way to tell how long your level should be, I guess the closest winning formula would be 2~3 times longer than the minimum time from our first hypothesis. Thats roughly around 2~6 minutes for one level.

Here's our final hypothesis:
A level must be completable within a minimum time of 1~2 minutes and not longer than 6 minutes.


There are many exceptions to the rule, like modern platformers with coops or mixing platformer with other genres. Bear in mind it works only as a guideline not a must.