Ooh, nice topic!
I've always been just as keen on designing levels as playing them, ever since I started with
Repton 3 for the BBC Micro when I was 4. I still make levels for the Repton series;
here's an example of one of mine (with my own walkthrough).
After we got our first Mac when I was around 9 (the same age I started playing
Lemmings), I discovered my second major outlet for the level-designing urge:
Spacestation Pheta, a mostly forgotten grid-based platformer with a mixture of execution and puzzle elements. As with
Repton, I made a huge number of mediocre levels in the early years, but much later, I designed a 100-level set, "Daedalus's Revenge", limiting myself to only the basic game elements and introducing a new element every 20 levels, and building the most complex mazes and logical puzzles I could with that limitation. I still have one of our Macs, and I really hope that one day I'll be able to get it up and running again so that I can save those levels in some form....
Over the next few years, the inclusion of a level editor was one of my main criteria when choosing games, so there were a lot of games I designed a handful of levels for, and I won't try to list them all. My levelset "House of Fun" for
Bub and Bob (a Mac-based
Bubble Bobble clone) was notable in that I made graphics as well as levels; this is where some of the tiles from my Lix tileset originated.
I'd attempted making my own games since the BBC Micro years, but my first completed games were done in my teens, using
HyperCard. I made a Repton-like game, a simplistic RPG, and
Hubris, a clone of the puzzle mode of
Tetris Attack with my own puzzles. (A few years ago, there was a thread on this forum where Insane Steve helped me import these levels into
Tetris Attack and then solved them.)
Then we come to the years when I discovered this forum, Cheapo, and so forth. You know about all that
In 2007, I discovered the
Deadly Rooms of Death series of games, a turn-based dungeon crawler in which each monster has its own predictable movement pattern, and while many rooms are pure hack-and-slash, there is a vast puzzle space to explore based around monster manipulation (sometimes with only
one monster per room, or even none, as there are other deadly elements, and a "conquer token" forces you to reach a specific tile for the room to count as cleared). I found the games unapproachably hard at first (not helped by the fact that I joined right before
The City Beneath came out), but with the release of entry-level
Gunthro and the Epic Blunder in 2012, I got back into the games, and it's been my primary gaming passion ever since then.
Sadly, it's taken me a very long time to build up enough confidence at DROD architecture to attempt a hold. I released "Castle Repton" (with level layouts based on those of
Repton 3) in 2016 for the spinoff
DROD RPG, and I have a second RPG hold, "Tetrahedron", complete except for some level intro screen texts. The release of
The Second Sky in 2014 inspired me to start a hold using some TSS elements aimed at novice players, which I called "Bubble Wrap" since it was originally going to use roaches as its only monsters (my friend Jonathan commented that holding down a direction to blaze through a line of roaches reminded him of popping bubble wrap). Then a group of us decided to make a massive collaborative hold, eventually titled "The Descent of King Hesper", and "Bubble Wrap" got sidelined. Well, "King Hesper" is now around 90% complete and I really hope it will be finished this year, and I certainly intend to go back to "Bubble Wrap" when I can, even though the community buzz caused by the release of TSS is long since over.
I've also started a project,
School of Adventure, in RPG Maker, but continuing that is a pretty low priority at the moment.