coyote_blue

Lessons learned:

*Reviewing levels with a critical eye is HARD. I knew that it was before, but I see now, more than ever, the importance of first impressions. Someone who's volunteered to take on the task of spotlighting or otherwise singling out levels for praise is essentially agreeing to not have fun playing those levels. The challenge, then, is not just to make a level that's engaging, but to have its "essence" immediately available to someone who may only have a few ounces of their ragged attention span left to give you, through no fault of their own.

*Not getting answers to your threads sucks. But double-posting threads makes it worse, because people learn to actively ignore you, rather than just doing it passively.

*Publishing several unrelated levels on the same day sends a signal, and that signal stops people from playing your levels.

*For some reason, some folks wait until a thread has one hit before they give it a second. There's no other way to explain how I found a few week-old threads, replied, and they got follow-up hits in less than 24 hours.

*This is a good stunt to repeat. I'd love to see more people commit to doing 5 or ten at a time. If there were a dozen people doing that once a month, no one would ever come to this forum and meet silence.

THE FINAL FOUR:

30/33. TechnoSky. Barebones, but super-tough platformer.

31/33. A Music Level That Starts With a K. Sometimes, the critique is not about the level. Sometimes, it's about why the creator chose to Open a thread about it. (I meant to link, but it broke. Search for "Kunglim" and that might work.)

32/33. Old Man Sam. Amusement that's in poor taste. Which I assume is OK to Mm, since they DO include the fart sound object in Story Mode.

33/33. SoundBot. Loud in more ways than one. A sync contest entry with a neat central premise.