Howdy y’all! This time I’m going to show you the little tweaks I made to the game’s platforming logic to make it feel ‘just right’.
Pre-emptive Inputs
After I decided to go with the approach of making the game a single button platformer, a lot of elements from previous prototyping seemed to fit into place. But the game was still frustrating to control in specific circumstances.
As a very quick reminder, you can spawn and jump off a bubble up to six times before needing to land on a solid surface to replenish them instantly. Wall jumping doesn’t consume one of your six bubbles and thus, judicious use of wall jumps is required in later levels to help ration your extra bounces.
Therefore, when something like this happened…
...or maybe you just pressed jump JUST as you were landing…
...needless to say, this was massively frustrating. You’ve used up a bubble and have been punished for something that's more of a technicality than a fun gameplay mechanic. Ugh.
This actually isn’t particularly difficult to fix and simply involves looking ahead a few pixels at the time the jump button is pressed and treating the input as a ‘normal’ jump rather than a bubble jump if a solid surface is ahead of the player. This is something worth considering if you have a double jump system in your own game!
Here's how it looks afterwards:
Much better, quicker, smoother-feeling wall jumping!
There's only 12 pixels in it, but that makes a huge difference to the game considering a jump as 'landed' and means no frustrating KOs!
Mantling
This one is more common in platform games these days, but it’s well worth considering if you’re also developing one. In very early prototypes, if Bubbles jumped towards a ledge but was juuust short of reaching the top, Bubbles would wall grab it instead, which a) looks ridiculous and b) is infuriating.
This was resolved by having Bubbles mantle the ledge if you’re close enough to the top of a ledge, making this waaaaay more fluid.
...but there’s a little more logic in place to prevent you from doing this if mantling would lead you into spikes as this would also be a big cause of frustration.
The player gently gets pushed down onto the block - looks a little silly if you're paying attention, but is so much better than climbing head-first into some spikes uncontrollably.
Keepin’ the Flow
What these all hopefully contribute to is a much smoother, less frustrating platformer - the idea should be if you miss the jump, you definitely missed it.
It’s also worth noting that some of these techniques also have minor speedrunning implications as if you nail your timing, you can leap away from walls fractionally earlier or climb up when you "shouldn’t" be able to. I’m really looking forward to seeing how speedrunners will break my levels!
Thanks for reading! These articles are a pretty regular feature that I'm running up to the game’s launch. You can keep up to date on when I do these devlogs by wishlisting the game. You can also follow the game's development on Twitter, where I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about the game or game development in general.
Until next time!
Johnny
Team Cats & Bears