Well, I did some extensive thinking about level ideas, and I came up with a campaign that fulfilled a couple of perimeters I had in mind;
First, making it easy to play. (For little kids, seeing as the casting spell bit of Aquaria might be hard to grasp for people below 7)
Second, seemingly simple.
Third ; Plenty of opportunities for secrets and goodies, and finally, having a good plotline that allows creative mapbuilding (something just about all maps have!)
So what I came up with, is a storyline/discription something like :
Naija, while traveling in a tidal current, is attacked by a horde of (something, or she could get lost in a whirlpool. Perhaps an actually whirlpool with a script to lose items/spells and then a cut...sorry, back to description) She fights them off, only to realize that her spellbook and all of her equipment have been lost. All she has left is some bandages. Will you help her?
The idea is, that Naija loses most of her abilitys/equipment (allowing for many different rewards, something important to any game) and travels down a large tunnel with a continuing current (think finding Nemo and the east australian current). For several (more or less I cannot decide right now) parts of the map, you'll have a big enemy of some kind chasing you. The monsters near the start of the mapset are smaller, and the ones at the end are bigger (more on size in a sec). The part about having one big current makes it easy to be creative. I could possibly script a timer, and if you fail to get to the end in time, a horde of monsters swarms you, or you lose, or the boss eats you....I could make debris that you must avoid or you take damage, have various rewards just floating on the current....
Anyway, one of the fundamental parts of this idea is to have several branching caves along the current, where you can find equipment, supplies, spells, ect. Near the beginning of the mapset I plan to make less exploring (and smaller bosses, so they can follow you, making your exploring harder) and near the end, I plan to have a ball of bigger bosses, with a couple of creative ones (ones that spawn monsters that track you down perhaps (they'll have lots of hp and damaging dealing potential, so you won't want to fight them) or something of that sort)
That's one of the idea's thats been knocking around in my head...Thoughts?