Hi, i'm some random guy who plays project Arrhythmia. i've come here to complain about guide you along making good beatmaps. please ignore the fact that i haven't actually made any myself

This guide assumes that you already know how to make a beatmap, so don't come here expecting a basic tutorial. Most of this guide will be just design choices you can make to minorly improve the gameplay of your level.

Let's say you got this really cool character with lots of sharp bits sticking out of them. However, when you actually play the level, the sharp bits make it hard to tell where the character starts and ends. The solution is to change every part of the character to a decoration part type, then hide a normal type part behind them on the lowest layer. Now all the sharp bits don't damage and there's a clear, defined hitbox around the center of your character.

This isn't locked to characters though, you could have this crazy beam with giant wavy particle effects everywhere while the beam's hitbox is only a single block. You can even use hitboxes to make attacks seem smaller than they look, making the player feel better about getting past an attack that was easier than it first seems.

I've played many beatmaps where i feel so overwhelmed since there's almost no space to dodge anything. This is a pretty general idea, but you should always give the player ample space to move around when dodging attacks. The worst offenders are usually characters, where people make them much larger than they need to be in order to add detail easier and keep the camera at the same small size.

The 2 different solutions i can think of right now is either make the character smaller or keep the camera larger. Either one works better for different beatmaps.

You've spent hours on your beatmap, making everything look astounding, but there's one issue: there's so many visual effects that you can't tell what's an attack and what isn't. It's almost always a good idea to keep attacks defined from effects, usually by keeping all the attacks the same color or making decorations darker than everything else. It all depends on what the attack or decoration is.

basically just use your brain and follow your gut. There's no real "guide" to good design, you can only tell what's good and what's bad from looking at it and testing how it feels. Always remember to play test through your entire level before publishing it.

TL;DR use hidden parts to deal damage instead of visual parts, make sure the player can move around, and make sure you can tell what's going on.

i'll probably update this if i think of anything and people actually look at it. go ahead and argue in the comments over whether or not these are even good advice if you want.