Week Four and Five

Week Four and Five was spent doing a lot of research and playtesting existing platforming games, so I decided to merge these two weeks into one post in the hopes of making the post worth reading.

The beginning of the week was spent playtesting a multitude of different games: Vista World / Rolling Rascal / Spyro are the ones I am going to be talking about.

Lets begin with Vista World, a demo that I have been following for quite a while now.

“Vista World is a game that embraces the joy of movement, exploration, and overcoming challenges. It seamlessly blends retro aesthetics with modern gameplay mechanics, resulting in a distinctive and immersive gaming experience. If you have a fondness for 3D platformers, Vista World promises to be a journey you won't want to miss.”

A few months ago I played the first demo on the Steam Deck, and loved the movement - so came back for the second version of the Demo, that boasted more levels. It is worth mentioning as well, I am also in the discord for VistaWorld, and often have conversations with the developer. I decided to record my playthrough, and say whatever came into my head, I tried to speak my thoughts to give the developer a insight into what I was doing and why.

Summing up what I noticed and enjoyed about Vista World :

1. The Level Design is majorly different to the previous demo, during the tutorial sequences - it had a lot more elevation and height- it gave me more time to get used to the different types of jumps, along with different ways to climb the sewer. It gave me a sense of freedom and it felt like I was exploring this sewer, even though I was just in the tutorial level.

2. Each Individual Level takes a idea and runs with it as much as it can - one individual enviromental mechanic experimented with, and then pushed to make it as complicated as it can be. This gives each level a unique feel and makes you feel like your really mastering a mechanic as you complete each level. They are layed out in a way that if you use your moveset correctly you can speed your way through the level even while collecting all of the fruits, but you can also take your time if you are not as confident.

Using the below image as a example, one of the first levels takes on a aspect found in most 3D platformers - moving platforms. You can see in the image it is just basic platforms moving left to right, then forwards and backwards - further on in the level, they move on both axis - and then dissapear into waterfalls which are toxic - then they spin. The final section of level tests you on all of these aspects put together but all while keeping that level flow.

3. Collectable Placement within these levels work as a great tool as to where you need to direct yourself in order to complete it. Not once throughout any of the levels did I need to backtrack in order to 100% all of the collectables, which at first did feel a bit weird as I felt like I had not explored the entire level as I am used to in other platformer games, it was a nice change.

If I was to make an improvement to the game play I would alter the hub world. In the hub world you can access the different levels that are locked behind a certain amount of the collectable fruit and planets. The layout of the entire hub world is a circle, with a castle in the middle, and each one of the doors is on the outskirts of the said castle - but I kept getting lost trying to find the next level.

To combat this I would replicate an effect that was used in the Sewer Level, when a door is unlocked, pan the camera away from the character to the door and actively show it opening. This would show the path the player has to take to get to the door, as well as showing off any points of interest in order to help guide the player.

After playing through the other games, I decided to work on a key movement within Out Of Water, the swimming. Out of Water aims to re - invent what a underwater platformer is, when you mention a underwater platformer you think, un precise and floaty controls, your mind will most likely jump towards that one underwater level in that one game that you absolutely hated. Out Of Water plans to alter that. I plan to take all the skills required to be good at the generic 3D platformer and change it to be underwater. 3D Platformers require a few different things, accuracy / awareness / planning. Accuracy in regards to knowing your moveset, knowing your speed, knowing exactly where you are going to land etc… Awareness in regards to the environment, you have to look at a jump and instantly know if you are going to make it, you have to know instantly what is a hazard and what is not etc… Planning in regards to looking at the environment in front of you and instantly having a plan to traverse through it.

These aspects are handled by most 3D platformers above ground using a few different techniques, a few that I have already implemented. Consistent Variable Jump Heights - in Out Of Water, when you hold the jump button, you jump higher and when you release it you fall to the ground faster, continue to hold that button and you will fall slower. Coyote Jump Timers, giving the player a little leeway in regards to when that jump button can be pressed, are they about to land? Go on, let them jump. Have they just left a platform? Go on, let them jump.

Further techniques in platformers include having a shadow always beneath the character regardless where the light source is actually coming from. This allows the player to know exactly what they are above - and therefore exactly where they are going to land - without having to move the camera directly above the character every time they need to land a precise jump. This is something I plan to implement later on within the project.

First step was creating another concrete state, called CharacterInWaterState, that would get automatically swapped to if the character was in water. This would allow me to encapsulate the unique gravity / behaviors that the character should have when they are in the water. That can be seen implemented above, when the character enters the water, they are in the InWater State, I have further tweaked the movement below.

I then proceeded to create a sub state script, called CharacterSwimState, that would hold all the swim movement rather than having it within the Concrete state. The Rising / The Sinking is all contained within this script. It was as simple as giving the Swim State the sub state of Idle / Walk / Run so that the states relationships would be as follows, InWater -> Swim -> Idle / Walk / Run - giving the player the option of moving throughout the water.

Then it was getting the sinking and rising working, which just required adding new sections to the InputActionMapping of the character, for PC being the Space Bar / Ctrl and on Controller (A/B) or the respective equivalents. Then it was altering the CharacterStateMachine script to include callback events to read and assign the value of these buttons when they are released / pressed into different variables. These variables then utilize Getters / Setters to allow me to access these variables within the InWater / Swim States.

I then decide, because why not, to add little eye animations for a bit of visual feedback to the player, when the player is rising the eyes move upwards and when the player is moving downwards the eyes move downwards. This is just done by using Animation Controller Parameters Bools that are set when each of the buttons are pressed in their respective states.

After getting this functioning the way I planned, I decided to add a quick camera effect to show when the character is underwater - it is not exactly ideal to do this now - but when I am asking people to test it, currently there is now way to know when your about to exit the water, when your in the water etc. I created 2 new post processing volumes one that covers above ground and one that covers underwater - when the camera enters the water, it triggers a event that toggles the Fog Effect of the game, giving the game the underwater look without too much hassle.

After being pleased with the current underwater movement - I moved onto the roll mechanic. The plan was to have to player only be able to enter the Roll Sub State from the Run Sub State, and then slowly increase the speed of the rolling character until a certain threshold is met - however I have decided against this for now, but have the framework to implement this easily later on in development. Why? In games I have played recently in order to get a feel for the Genre in a higher detail, too much speed causes problems. I will use Rolling Rascal as a example. Rolling Rascal is a high speed platformer that takes a lot of its mechanics from the popular Sonic Franchise - the transitioning into a ball, charging your movement, dashing towards certain objects - all taken from the respective Sonic Games. It hits these targets well - but there are some major disadvantages, when you are moving so fast you miss exploring the world, you miss collecting the optional coins, and it does not feel good to have to turn around and slowly walk around the level to get the coins. The thing is with Rolling Rascal the movement controls are designed to be good when you are moving fast, so therefore the controls are horrible when your moving slowly. They aren’t precise they are floaty. Meaning that when you try to collect a coin, it takes a few attempts because you have to trial and error with the movement. The same can be said about the camera, I found myself fighting with the camera, but only when I was moving slowly.

Now from my designers perspective - they have designed it well, the camera / movement is great when your flying through the level as fast as you can - which the player is motivated to do via the Stop Watch Feature - but in Out of Water the camera and movement needs to feel good no matter the speed. In Out of Water there is a heavy concentration on the collectable items throughout the game, so having too much speed could effect the ability to collect all of the items. This obviously goes hand in hand with the level design, there is no point designing a large expansive world, if your character does not move very fast.

Rolling Rascal urges you to go fast, the large worlds, the speed boosts etc everything is designed to make the player want to go fast. The fastest you can go in Rolling Rascal is when your in your ball, and it FEELS good, it FEELS satisfying way more so than the walking.

I will have to be careful when designing and implementing the roll because all of the characters states need to feel good to be in, and there needs to be reasons why they are in them.

What is next for Out of Water? I am going to alter the movement above ground by removing the sprint functionality and increasing the walk speed to something a little less than what the run speed is now. Why? Although level design plays a lot into why you would need to sprint - the character at his current walk speed cannot jump very far in relation to how high he can jump - and the current test level does not require the need to walk in anyway - so this leads to the run and roll feeling so much better than the walk.

After playing a few different platformers some games have sprints some don’t but from a design perspective I want the jump length and height be predictable and removing the walk removes two different jumps the player has to learn.

I also plan to add a slam functionality into all of the jumps, this would allow the player to slam towards the ground - think Super Mario - to destroy certain objects and hit the floor a lot faster even if they have decided to cancel the jump.

I also plan to add a dive functionality as at the moment the player in order to do a forward jump, the player has to be not moving and then jump with a forward jump button pressed, which works but is a bit inefficient and un ergonomic. I plan to reuse this logic in order to create a dive that adds a forward movement to the character when they are in the air.

I also plan to add a double jump but am not entirely sure which way I would implement this, I could just add a generic double jump - or do a Mario 64 Style jump, where if you jump right after you have landed, you jump higher etc.

This will be decided after more research.