I love Stardew Valley... Well, I love MOST of Stardew Valley. Junimo Kart, however, is a flaming trainwreck. (Granted, I despise "runner" games of any sort, but if you're going to force it into a game of a totally different genre, appealing to totally different sorts of players who very likely don't like runner games, it might as well be done properly...) I figure that the game is made available only late in game progression, and has no achievements associated with it for a reason, but I figured I'd list ways of making this game more playable: 1: Better recognition of the cart's capabilities. This game frequently forces literally impossible jumps. I have seen jumps I couldn't make because there was no way to jump far enough. (I jumped at nearly the last possible moment, held the click down as long as I could, and still missed the track by two tiles worth.) I have seen jumps that are impossible, especially in later stages, because they require landing on a low track, then immediately making two more jumps in two more tiles that are the full jump height of the cart above where I just landed. By the time I can jump that high, even while clicking with perfect reflexes, I would still be 2-3 tiles further away. The most frequently recurring problems come when I'm supposed to jump onto a track that is "upward tilted", and usually a tile or two higher in elevation - these are often impossible jumps that seem to think that you can latch onto an upward ramp a tile lower than you actually can. Also problematic is the third (magma) stage, where the cart moves much faster, and the sixth (green) stage, where the cart moves slower - these result in demanding the cart jump upwards in less horizontal space traveled than the cart can jump, or else involves many impossibly long jumps for the horizontal momentum the cart has. EDIT: Here is a screenshot of an impossible jump in action (not seen - to the left is a long jump that forces landing on that one-tile-wide platform on the far left of this screen): http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683202479 Another: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683268932 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683696301 Another problem is that some jumps require you drop down to a lower platform that sticks out a little further. If you try to jump from above this small ledge, and rely upon height to carry you over, you'll fail, because of the parabolic arc, you need to be on the little ledge. The problem? You can't get on that ledge, because your forward momentum is too fast to land on the ledge before you're carried past it: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683696994 (This image was just the first one I remembered to screenie - I could actually make that jump from above, but it represents the problem.) 2: Add more controls. Many of the jumps, particularly jumps across a gap onto a one-tile-wide piece of track require near millisecond-precise timing to actually make. Remove the "hold the click longer to jump further" mechanic, and replace it with a mechanic for having two or three buttons that correlate to different jump heights, and base your procedural track generation code around those jump parabolas, alone. The fundamental problem is that this game demands a finer precision than is even humanly possible to make many of these jumps between single tiles of tracks amidst 2-5 tile wide gaps. These tiny targets in multiple jumps in a row demand you precisely measure your jumps, but even the fastest click I make has a 50% chance of being a pathetic jump that only goes half a tile off the track, or a full-strength jump. The game is wildly incapable of measuring player intent, and it completely breaks the game, turning it into a game of raw luck that you don't get set up with a demand to make impossibly precise jumps the broken controls won't allow you to make. 3: Post-death placement should not be blind. If I fall off the track, I can literally be placed one pixel away from the edge of the next track jump. Jumping over the "stops" takes over a full tile of build-up space to actually get enough air to clear the stop. I've had situations where I've lost four lives in a row because of the game placing my cart in impossible situations multiple times in a row. EDIT: I found another one... 4: Do not put track blocks on the ends of tracks that require maximum-length jumps. This is another classic "did not add a sanity check" problem of procedural content... http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683259838 (Example not actually the worst I've seen, but it's what I managed to screencap in time...) http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683269006 5: In fact, get rid of the one-tile wide pieces of track, entirely... These are by far the biggest cause of impossible jumps, as they frequently get stacked several in a row, with jumps where you need to jump up several tiles in height in less than the space of a single horizontal tile. Many of the giant leaps onto single tiles are also of mixed elevation, making the timing of the jump blind guesswork, as well. 6: The background constantly flickers at its "seams". This is especially evident in the second (ice) stage. Give players the capacity to shove the cart back a few tiles so that they have a chance to survive some gaps, and add a warning bar that tells the player how long until the cart starts moving again so that the player isn't forced to just rapid-click blindly to try to be clicking at the right moment to have a prayer on these "one pixel to jump before dying again" situations.
I think the biggest problem with junimo cart is that the "progress" mode is randomly generated. Your first and last suggestions would be easily fixed by having all of the levels be designed by hand; it would also help rectify the fact that there is no difficulty curve, since everything is completely random. My other complaint when playing was that timing my clicks was a huge pain sometimes - if I click just barely before I land, I don't jump, which makes doing certain series of jumps nigh impossible to get right. Reworking the controls so that having the left mouse button down when you land still count as a legitimate jump would make things much fairer in my opinion.
Procedural content isn't the problem, the problem is that the procedural content isn't properly calibrated to what the player is actually capable of doing. The different levels go at different speeds, which is why early levels can have jumps too long for the cart to possibly make - the cart doesn't go fast enough to make a jump it could make in a later stage when it's going faster, but later stages require jumps made in faster order than cart is physically capable of traveling. (The "you have to jump the instant you land" issue is an edge case of lesser importance than "you have to jump again BEFORE you've even landed, and are only 1/3rd of the way through your last jump.") All of these are problems for which the procedural algorithms can generate solutions, it just takes a tweaking of the guidelines of those algorithms.
