17th October 2017, 8:06 PM
As an example of a recent game where the moves are tied directly to level design, the Crash Bandicoot HD remakes and Super Mario All-Stars. In the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, Crash's jumping was altered. His jumps, up and down, are faster and his landing on certain things is more slippery (that's more due to changes in how the game renders level geometry, but it affects controls). As a direct result, the way levels play has to be changed. Platformers in particular are drastically affected by changes like this. Since every platform is placed with Crash's abilities in mind, a change to how Crash controls can ruin a lot of jumps and large sections loose their rhythm. The games are still playable, and beatable (testing made sure to that) but it isn't as fun and a lot of deaths feel cheap as a result. Now look at Super Mario All-Stars. With one exception, the way Mario controls remains identical to how he controlled in each of the Mario game, and I do mean each one on an individual level. He didn't control exactly the same across all 4 games, and so he doesn't control the same in the games in the remake. They kept his movement and controls identical on a per-game basis because the jumps and the flow from one obstacle to the next depended on it. There is one notable exception in SMB1, a code flaw where a number had it's sign reversed, so that when breaking a brick instead of bouncing down like in the original Mario is pulled up slightly into the brick. This breaks the flow of speed running or certain fun paths where every time you jump into a brick, the one next to it stops your forward momentum for a bit so you have to get back on track. It's not so bad it breaks the game, and the rest of the physics are spot-on, but it's notable that such a tiny change can affect the way the game feels to many high level players. I bring all this up as an example of how movement physics and level design need to compliment each other beyond the basic "this move can break this item" thinking.
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Now let's look at the quills. What are the purpose of coins, rings, notes, and bananas? Yes, getting 100 gets you an extra life (or opens a door in the case of notes), but that's not their purpose. A 1-up mushroom or key could easily substitute and the designer would only need to place 1 of those instead of 100. The real purpose of these items is to act as breadcrumbs. All of those things, when used properly, either guide the player along an intended path, or hint at possible secrets. That's their real purpose. The extra lives or door unlocks associated with them are merely to make sure the player is motivated to follow them. Way back in Super Mario Bros, level 2, you see coins on top of a large block that might just seem like decoration, but you want to see if you can get up there. Once you are up there, you notice you can break blocks above that and you are suddenly above the level along a secret path skipping everything else. The coins are what made you investigate that height in the first place. You're running along a level with some bottomless pits, but you notice a banana trail leading off the edge and seemingly going down to nowhere. You take a chance and take a leap of faith finding out that the banana trail was showing you a secret bonus barrel just below the fall. You have been following notes when you notice there are a few notes on top of a mansion way out of your reach. Their presence there makes you look around and you see a few more notes on a bush, then a few more a bit higher up on a fence, and as you keep finding them you keep going until you find yourself on top of that mansion. The notes led the way the whole time, but you end up thinking you found a secret all by yourself. In most of these platformers, you will find on reflection that the programmers often tricked you into feeling smart when they were guiding you by the nose all along. This isn't a bad thing, it's the way the games are designed. Rings in Sonic are a special case. Sometimes they were placed as breadcrumbs, but just as often they were just sort of scattered around levels as recharges so you didn't run out. Sonic Mania took a page out of Nintendo's book and made ring placement far more consistently function as breadcrumbs.
Compare this to Yooka Laylee. The quills are just scattershot throughout the level. There's no sense of using them as breadcrumbs the way notes were used in the Banjo games. They are just "there". If you ask me, there was key staff missing from the development of this game, that staff being Miyamoto and the gang, the Nintendo big wigs that guided their hand during the development of games like Donkey Kong Country. Retro has that same guidance right now, and watching staff interviews indicates just how much that mattered. Things like this are why I don't think YL is as good as the old N64 games. DK64, whatever else you might say, also used bananas properly as breadcrumbs.
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Now let's look at the quills. What are the purpose of coins, rings, notes, and bananas? Yes, getting 100 gets you an extra life (or opens a door in the case of notes), but that's not their purpose. A 1-up mushroom or key could easily substitute and the designer would only need to place 1 of those instead of 100. The real purpose of these items is to act as breadcrumbs. All of those things, when used properly, either guide the player along an intended path, or hint at possible secrets. That's their real purpose. The extra lives or door unlocks associated with them are merely to make sure the player is motivated to follow them. Way back in Super Mario Bros, level 2, you see coins on top of a large block that might just seem like decoration, but you want to see if you can get up there. Once you are up there, you notice you can break blocks above that and you are suddenly above the level along a secret path skipping everything else. The coins are what made you investigate that height in the first place. You're running along a level with some bottomless pits, but you notice a banana trail leading off the edge and seemingly going down to nowhere. You take a chance and take a leap of faith finding out that the banana trail was showing you a secret bonus barrel just below the fall. You have been following notes when you notice there are a few notes on top of a mansion way out of your reach. Their presence there makes you look around and you see a few more notes on a bush, then a few more a bit higher up on a fence, and as you keep finding them you keep going until you find yourself on top of that mansion. The notes led the way the whole time, but you end up thinking you found a secret all by yourself. In most of these platformers, you will find on reflection that the programmers often tricked you into feeling smart when they were guiding you by the nose all along. This isn't a bad thing, it's the way the games are designed. Rings in Sonic are a special case. Sometimes they were placed as breadcrumbs, but just as often they were just sort of scattered around levels as recharges so you didn't run out. Sonic Mania took a page out of Nintendo's book and made ring placement far more consistently function as breadcrumbs.
Compare this to Yooka Laylee. The quills are just scattershot throughout the level. There's no sense of using them as breadcrumbs the way notes were used in the Banjo games. They are just "there". If you ask me, there was key staff missing from the development of this game, that staff being Miyamoto and the gang, the Nintendo big wigs that guided their hand during the development of games like Donkey Kong Country. Retro has that same guidance right now, and watching staff interviews indicates just how much that mattered. Things like this are why I don't think YL is as good as the old N64 games. DK64, whatever else you might say, also used bananas properly as breadcrumbs.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)