Posts Tagged platformer
The elegance of Continuity.
Posted by The Management in design, games on December 12, 2009
Every once in a while, I check out a batch of interesting-looking Flash games. Most of them lose their charm after a few minutes, but here and there an occasional gem crops up. Continuity is one of these gems.
The game’s gotten plenty of publicity so it doesn’t really need my attention, but I did want to talk a bit about its execution. Combining platforming with a tile sliding puzzle is a clever genre-mashup, but it’s Continuity’s overall package that grabbed my attention.
The first level contains only closed off tiles, with one tile cleverly serving as the controls layout, and the other taking the role of filler to keep the tile sliding mechanic consistent.
The visuals are sparse and abstract, but also very clean. Two music tracks accompany the action, one in the platforming section and one in the tile sliding section, and a quite a few sound effects are used for feedback. Level progression follows a nice, gradual curve, and every time a new concept is introduced (e.g., switching tiles in mid-jump or using multiple keys), the complexity of the layout is scaled back.
And then there’s the interface.
When I first saw screenshots of Continuity, I was half-dreading switching from keyboard controls to mouse controls every time I wanted to move one of the tiles. I pictured dragging the cursor to the appropriate square, clicking the mouse button (or worse yet, holding it and physically sliding the tile), watching the tile glide to its destination, moving the cursor back to the tile with my character, once again clicking the mouse button, and finally going back to the keyboard-controlled platforming.
The empty spot is in the center, and any of its 4 adjacent tiles can be slid into its position at the touch of a button.
But no, Continuity surprised me with yet another elegant design decision. The spacebar toggles between the platforming and the tile sliding, while the arrow keys control all movement. This includes the player avatar during the platforming sections, and the tile sliding during the puzzle sections.
The platforming is fairly straightforward with the left and right arrows dictating direction, and the up arrow serving as the jump button. Keys and doors are also picked up/activated automatically, removing the need for any extra input.
The tile puzzle uses the arrow keys as well, but in a slightly different fashion. At any one time, there are a maximum of 4 tiles that can slide into the single empty slot. If the player wants to fill the gap with a tile that’s underneath it, he simply presses up and the tile slides into its position. This creates a new empty gap, and the arrow keys get re-mapped to its adjacent tiles.
Some of the later levels employ rather complex tile-edges that make for numerous valid combinations.
It’s an interface that’s custom made for the requirements of the puzzle section, and it’s very intuitive. The player never has to select the tile he wants to manipulate either, which speeds things up quite considerably. This is especially important since Continuity’s gameplay requires lots of tile sliding.
I don’t think a lot of people take notice of such things, but that’s the way it should be; if it works well, it shouldn’t really stick out. It did for me, though, and it made me spend a lot more time with the game than I do with typical Flash offerings.
Then again Continuity has the polish and depth that many similar titles lack, so that shouldn’t be too surprising.
What made those old, 2D platformers so great?
Posted by The Management in design on May 13, 2009
A little while ago I dug into Scary Girl for not being a very fun game. This brought up some discussion about what actually makes a good 2D platformer, so I decided to expand on the topic. Below is a list of what I see as three common aspects of many classic platforming titles. These point are not the only things that made those games great, but they’re a shared base that appears again and again.
Scary Girl and the bane of platformers that is physics.
Posted by The Management in design on April 16, 2009
Scary Girl got quite a bit of attention at the tail end of GDC ‘09. It’s out now, and it’s free, so I decided to give it a go.
Yes, it's pretty.
The game’s aesthetics are definitely its high-point, somewhat aping the twisted surrealism of Beetlejuice. Scary Girl even does some interesting things like the animating dialogues — something that I’ve been meaning to throw into a game ever since reading demian5’s When I Am King.
As a platformer, though, it’s simply bad.
I also found myself scratching my head when my character wasn't picking up the collectibles she was overlapping.
The issue with Scary Girls is what’s endemic to so many indie games: an overabundance and over-reliance on physics. For every Armadillo Run, there’s ten titles like Pac-Man physics. This particularly hurts platformers as the whole genre relies on “tight” controls and precise movement (even in the easy games).
Yes, Mario, Sonic and Mega Man all had physics, but they weren’t realistic. The algorithms behind those games were MIN/MAX-ed to attain a certain “feel,” and the level design reflected that. There was usually no need to involve mass, the Coriolis effect, or the actual trajectory of a human jumping ten times his own height in an earth-like environment. Instead, the physics were meant to be fun and intuitive, and the architecture of the levels supported them and the player’s goals.
You need to jump to get the cross of collectibles, but hardly any of the possible trajectories will achieve that.
Sure, N was quite a departure from that, but it wasn’t your typical Flash platformer either. It had a very zoomed out view, a high resolution, lots of different surfaces, etc. The game still wasn’t my cup of tea, but it was aware of its strengths and used them to build unique and entertaining playgrounds. Most physics-based platformers, though, seem to occupy a space somewhere in between N and nostalgic games like Mario, and they’re rarely any good.
Scary Girl’s second stage is the ubiquitous underwater level, and, naturally, it’s even slower and floatier than the on-land action. It also uses tank controls, i.e., left/right to rotate, forward to advance, and it’s a mess. Even though you have to dive, the buoyancy of the water is constantly rotating your character to face up. What’s worse, there’s an air meter, water currents, and painfully slow step-like diving movements. It’s pretty much the complete opposite of fun.
Despite its good looks, the game’s an awkward struggle with no flow. I doubt I’ll ever play it again.
Monster World IV bits.
Posted by The Management in games on February 21, 2009
Arsha and her sidekick.
Monster World IV is something of a semi-official sequel to Wonder Boy 5: Monster World 3. It’s a cutesy, large-sprited side-scroller in which the player takes on the role of a young girl named Arsha.
The game is mostly a linear platformer with some rudimentary puzzles and RPG elements, but its highlight is the cute little sidekick Pepe. It’s easy to initially assume that Pepe will help you fight the various enemies you encounter, but he never actually attacks anyone. Instead, he can be used to help Arsha traverse the game’s environments. This might not sound like a big deal, but the there’s lots of variety here:
About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I work as a videogame design consultant. I'm also the creative lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and write a lot of it down too, so I figured why not make it public?
If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line at themanagement@significant-bits.com.