Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4.25
“No climb” blocks prevent Juni from going up a wall; they're invisible to the player (top)
but can be seen in the
Knytt Stories
editor (bottom).
But it's jarring for a player, scampering up a wall, to suddenly encounter a piece of wall that
won't hold her. It can seem every bit as artificial as a sudden ceiling, and, what's more, the
player can only discover that a wall is not climbable by trying to climb it. That leads to wasted
player time, as the player tries every wall to discover which are climbable and which, seemingly
arbitrarily, are not.
What smart authors have done is find a way to visually distinguish climbable from nonclimb-
able walls. The simplest way involves using another object from the object bank: waterfalls.
They come in blocks the size of any other game block and are entirely superficial. They don't
affect the rules of the game, but authors have used them to communicate rules. Draw a water-
fall over a wall, or over the side that the player might otherwise have expected to climb, and
it becomes clear the wall is not climbable: it's too wet (see Figure
4.26
). Once the player gets
a sense of
this logic, she'll be able to recognize, from then on, which walls Juni can climb and
which she can't.
Here's a different solution: simply draw different walls, having a wall version that's climbable
and a version that's not climbable. One way to do this is by drawing walls that have visible
handholds in them and other walls that are smooth. If the player sees handholds, she knows
that wall is climbable. If there are no handholds, she expects that the wall is not climbable (see
F i g u r e 4 . 2 7 ) .
