Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
but now Mario has a double jump in the form of the spin move. This
move can be used to correct most bad jumps, and thus destroys most of
the tension of the game.
I really can't stress enough how important the jump is in a platform-
er, and it pains me to see so many game developers—indie developers
in particular—misunderstanding this. For instance, Team Meat's lead
designer Edmund McMillen said this about his game
Super Meat Boy
:
It feels to me better than
Mario
, which was in my mind the perfect way
for a platformer to feel. It feels like
Mario
, but in a lot of ways, a lot of
aspects of it feel better. It feels faster. It feels like I have more control,
especially in the air. I feel like I have complete control over the charac-
ter, and that is…number one with a platformer…
To me, this is yet another example of the “more is more� philosophy
creeping in. McMillen is saying that the controls in
Super Meat Boy
“feel
better� than Mario because the player has more control. He even uses
the phrase “complete control,� which implies that he doesn't understand
how the jump mechanism works at all. Since game design is all about
carefully choosing limitations (rules), game designers should never be
bragging about giving players “complete control.�
Flight? Really?
I remember my excitement as a young child when I heard about Mario's
new ability to fly in
Super Mario Brothers
3
. How fantastic! Mario can
now soar through the air like a bird! Wow! Well, now that I'm an adult I
can see how counterproductive this addition actually was. Adding flight
to a platformer makes as much sense as putting a racing game on rails,
or adding auto-aim to a first-person shooter. It's allowing the player to
completely ignore the core mechanism of the game.
People think it's exciting to fly up and over an entire level or large
parts of one. Sure, for a second it's exciting in the same way that enter-
ing in an invincibility code is exciting, but as anyone who has used such
a code knows, it gets old quickly. It is not robust: it's flat and the initial
thrill of being able to basically skip the game wears of quickly. I mean,
why stop at skipping the level? You can skip the whole game by not even
playing in the first place!
Randomize
I know I mentioned this at the top of this chapter, but the lack of ran-
domization is really a serious problem for these games. As of this writ-
ing, there's only been one marginally well-known platformer that has