We decided to develop a lightweight game with easy to pick up mechanics with the intent to create a complete game in a short amount of time.
Graphic design efforts should be kept to a minimum as to have more time to focus on other problems.

In the first development stages the game had a very light design but was really hard for beginners. Throughout the development of the game, we spent a lot of time improving and refining those two things,
which was not an easy task since both of them are subjective. Some players learn faster than other players, so we had to make sure that a starter could clear levels with reasonable effort.
However, it is really hard to look through the eyes of a beginner since you were one of the few people who spent the most time playing the game.
As a Level designer, you tend to build a level that is interesting for yourself and almost forget that someone other than you has to play your level.
In early development, we struggled a lot to keep the difficulty difference between levels just steep enough.

To compensate that, we tried to communicate mechanics in the most straightforward way possible.
This manifested itself through tutorial animations, certain level design decisions and fundamental game design decisions. But still, one player might breeze through levels while another player feels overwhelmed with the controls.
The player should be challenged, not annoyed; it is very tough to maintain that. We made subtle changes to some levels so that there is one route that is slow and easy and a second one that is faster but tricky.

As levels got more complex, level building took more time. At some point, the only thing we had to add to the game was more content. So we got even more creative with the level design and started to tell little stories in levels.
The main focus of level design trasitioned from introducing the player to conveying something through the limited resources you had available.