First Person Platforming

Oh, how perspective makes a difference.

Infinite Level game discussed: The Future Project

Platforming gameplay from a first person perspective is famously challenging. Very few games can say they have pulled it off. Now, I won't claim to have achieved it myself – there's certainly some rough edges I could have smoothed out. But I will give myself credit for actively thinking about and trying to come up with some ways to smooth the first person platforming. So for this month's dev blog, I thought I'd share some of the things I did and the considerations I took when putting all the game together. Who knows? Maybe it'll inspire someone to take it a step further.

This being a metroidvania, it's only natural that you gain some abilities that simplify the platforming while also performing the duty of opening up entirely new areas. Much like the elemental powers I've talked about before, the movement abilities needed to have more than one function. The double jump couldn't solely exist to make platforming easier, and the air dash couldn't just be for crossing slightly larger gaps. Unlike the elemental powers however, the multi-functionality of movement abilities is, in my opinion, pretty intuitive. Of course the air dash can both open up previously unreachable areas and make those tricky platforms simpler to do. If it didn't naturally lend itself to those things, you'd have to wonder what on earth I was doing wrong.

But that's not to say that all platforming should be difficult right out of the gate. It's a bit unreasonable to ask players to gain new powers in order to make platforming more bearable over time. The way I thought about it, the difficulty of the platforming challenges should stay relatively the same throughout most of the adventure, with their "difficulty" coming from the number of abilities required to get through them. The final moments of The Future Project are a pretty good example of this. When you look at the actual platforms of the game's finale, they're not actually doing much. They just float in place, bobbing slowly up and down. The challenge is combining your abilities to make it across. It's not so much about timing and reflexes as it is stringing together your double jump, earth summons, air dash, and teleport abilities together. Many of the game's platforms are like this. It's not so much a skill check as it is an equipment check. Keeping platforms simple is also partially because I wanted to maintain some sense of place. It'd be kinda weird for Distant Sibling's rocks to start floating, for example, given the grounded nature of the world. It's mostly Heaven and Alien Remnant that get a bit whacky with the platforms. So, keeping things grounded in the name of immersion certainly helped me make sure to reign it in on the platforming front.

So, equipment checks as opposed to skill checks. That hopefully makes enough sense for a fully powered player, but what about a player character that hasn't acquired any of this stuff yet? You can't really "equipment check" the player at the beginning of the game when they have nothing. So, I did two things. First, a lot of the platforms are actually pretty large, even if they don't necessarily look it. You can pretty comfortably walk a few steps on most of the platforms in the game. Helping things along is a slightly larger than average collision capsule for the player, given a bit of extra width to make landing on those platforms easier. This does carry the consequence of being easier for enemies to land their hits, but that's part of the reason the player's base speed as well as their strafe ability are the way they are. It is of course a balancing act, so while I do say the player is a bit wider than they appear they also can't be so wide that everything hits them. In the end, I relied primarily on appropriately sized platforms so that the player has plenty of space to land their jumps. Similarly, I try to set the distance between platforms to something reasonable so that, barring any powers required to cross, the player should be able to jump to where they need to go fairly easily. That should be true from the beginning of the game all the way to the end.

Two elemental powers that shook up The Future Project's platforming challenges was Earth, with its secondary ability of creating your own platforms, and Aether, a teleportation ability. Earth allowed me to add another potential "equipment check" option to help vary the platforming challenges. But at the end of the day, it's basically giving the player a roundabout double jump and the ability to take their time with individual platforms, to an extent. It adds a layer, but not a very complicated one. Aether, on the other hand, was a very interesting addition to the platforming, which is part of the reason why it's saved for the endgame. Having the option to warp past damaging obstacles is a fun little twist to the platforming formula, not to mention the option to warp to increase your horizontal distance, similar to an air dash. In fact, in my playtesting, I found you can use Aether for some wacky speedrun tactics like angling yourself upwards to get both more horizontal and vertical distance after an air dash. But, it's best to leave those kinds of tricks to speedrunners. Aether use should be straightforward for the average player. Simply point where you want to go, warp, and you should get there. Abusing the game's physics to shed time off your run is more of a pro move that shouldn't be required. Because of the nature of teleportation, it was also important that information on where the player would end up be communicated as clearly as possible. The purple ball in the center of the screen is a physical object that goes past obstacles to indicate you'll teleport behind something, and the line coming down from it is meant to help you see if you'll land on a platform or not. If the line is cut off at the platform, you should be fine. These visual aids definitely took some trial and error to get right, but I'm glad they're in the game. Those sections calling for Aether would be unnecessarily difficult without it!

All this does beg the question...why have platforming at all? It's hopefully been made clear that there's plenty to consider when doing these things just from a design perspective. Now imagine having to check that the platforming feels good every time a player jumps! There's always the option to remove the problem entirely and make platforming non-existent, right? Well, yes, and I actually played around with this very early on in the game's development. A lot of the maps in their early stages had next to no platforming, which certainly made them easy to navigate...but they just weren't interesting. Putting aside some of the exaggerated fantasy seen in The Future Project, places just have gaps and holes in them. In our real world, we sometimes have to cross awkward gaps to get where we want to go. Some may find that obnoxious if they want a super casual hike, sure, but I think for a lot of people it adds a lot to the feeling of exploring and adventure, even if we know there's little that's truly unexplored in this world. So why not bring some of that feeling into a game? Once I added in more platforming, the world felt almost instantly more interesting to be in and explore, and the gameplay itself was more engaging. Even the simplest platforming made a difference. I'm not gonna tell you every game needs their main character jumping around the place to feel fun, but I do think it's worth considering what you're actually doing in a game's world. If the goal is to adventure and discover something new, then as simple as it sounds, maybe a little jumping around and climbing is exactly what you need to help that feeling.

And that's my take on first person platforming. Overall, it can be pretty easily boiled down to two things. Opt for equipment checks instead of skill checks, meaning minimal to no fast moving obstacles or overly long sequences. Alongside that, just make sure platforms are pretty generous so that players don't need to be so exact with their positioning. Seems pretty simple, and personally I'd say it is. I'm not the first to come up with this, really. In the moment to moment of the game's development, a lot of it just came down to feeling. Did it feel too obnoxious? Tone it down. Likewise, is platforming section in the late game not encouraging enough ability use? Maybe increase the spacing or elevation differences to encourage more power use. Through a little trial and error and a goal in mind of what I wanted the player to feel as they played, I would eventually end up with what is now in the final game.

Until next time!

-Lance T.