people love to conflate a lack of momentum with “responsiveness”
3 Likes
i think there’s quite a few reasons that indies tend towards momentumless platformers:
DIFFICULTY:
it’s just harder to make a platformer with momentum. it’s harder to program (more state, more variables to wrangle, more corner cases). it’s harder to tweak (it’s now a system and changing one aspect affects other things you might not have intended to affect).
like horizontal movement in a megaman-like controller is dead-simple. you’re either pressing left & right and you’re moving at a constant speed or you’re not (most games do miss some of the subtleties of megaman, like how tapping left or right in megaman lets you move one pixel because there’s actually a small amount of start up time).
HISTORY:
as an example (i’m not claiming a direct lineage here although it’s not that far off imo) maddy thorson the dev of celeste started in gamemaker without much programming experience, so naturally one of the earliest platformers she made – jumper – doesn’t have any horizontal momentum. in fact, most gamemaker platformers of the time had no horizontal momentum because it was much easier to implement and gamemaker (and most other contemporary creation tools) did not have an easy out-of-the-box solution for it. thus, indie devs of that era grew up playing and making those types of platformers, so when they got more experienced and made bigger games they still tended towards that style of platformer because that’s what they’re used to working with. jumper leads to games like i wanna be the guy or spelunky which leads to games like shovel knight and hollow knight.
BROADER GAME DESIGN TRENDS:
complexity in games has increased for a variety of reasons (better hardware, more buttons on controllers, etc). the biggest hurdle to keeping a player is the first couple hours of play, thus we need to adopt a set of “best practices” to reduce any friction we can while the player is still learning. physicsy momentumy movement is hard to learn. new controls are hard to learn. thus every game should have the same controls and the character should move the same way.
PSYCHOLOGY/CULTURE:
as RT-55J pointed out, some players will say games with momentum are “less responsive”. in a way this is true. it’s literally harder to make mario do what you want than it is to make megaman do what you want. there’s more for the player to keep track of. it’s easy to blame the game “these controls suck” vs. “i’ve not yet learned how to use these controls well”.
designer jargon seeps into the broader culture. “best practices” implies a literal hierarchy of systems and mechanics, some of which are “better” than others. difficult controls drive beginners away, and are thus bad. a stigma starts to develop around games that don’t follow these trends. maybe the player perceives the more difficult controls as artificial bad difficulty or like an artificial barrier preventing them from “actually” playing the game, failing to realize that learning the controls IS a large part of playing the game. people with social media attention spans give up playing because they’re not immediately good at the game.
APPENDIX
as an example of how much tweaking you might have to do for even a relatively simple character controller with momentum, expand below to see all the parameters my character has for my upcoming game
parameters for my character controller
const slow_ax := 27.0
const ax := 54.0
const run_ax := 63.0
const in_water_ax_mult := .5
const in_water_gravity_mult := .3
const in_water_friction_mult := .3
const ice_ax_mult := .5
const friction := 72.0
const knocked_out_friction := 25.2
const ice_friction_mult := 0.0
const h_bounce := .5
const on_ice_bounce := .7
const knocked_out_h_bounce := .8
const v_bounce_knocked_out := .8
const v_bounce_knocked_out_min_speed := 20.0
const air_bounce_min_speed = 15.0
const floor_bounce_min_speed = 30.0
const ice_bounce_min_speed = 5.0
const min_jump := -19.2
const low_jump := -19.2
const lightning_hop := -25.0
const jump := -30.6
const high_jump := -39.0
const jump_off_ladder_up := -14.0
const jump_off_ladder_down := 12.0
const short_ball_jump := -22.0
const high_ball_jump := -39.0
const small_short_ball_jump := -21.0
const small_high_ball_jump := -27.0
const walking_air_jump := -25.7
const running_air_jump := -25.7
const horizontal_ladder_snap := 2
const ladder_plat_corner_margin_above := 4
const ladder_plat_corner_margin_below := 6
const knock_out_speed := 30.6
const horizontal_head_knock_out_speed := 30
const horizontal_always_knock_out_speed := 45.0
const slow_walk := 15.0
const walk_speed := 30.0
const run_speed := 45.0
const max_speed := 90.0
const in_water_speed_mult := .80
const in_water_max_fall_speed_mult := .35
const max_fall_speed := 90.0
const gravity := 90.0
const hold_gravity := 18.0
const running_threshold_seconds = 1.8
const knocked_out_cooldown_seconds := .5
const knock_out_max_time_seconds := 3
const y_margin = .001
const x_margin = .001
const minimum_jump_time = .25
const jump_buffer_in_frames = 3
const ladder_buffer_in_frames = 3
const get_off_ladder_cooldown_in_frames = 10
const climb_frames_per_second := 12.0
const climb_below_ladder_pixels := 4
const throw_stregth_h_without_input := 15.0
const throw_strength_h_with_input := 30.0
const throw_strength_u := 75.0
oh also on the topic of celeste i perceive that game to be an interesting hybrid, where at low speeds it basically controls like megaman, but at high speeds you do maintain momentum. there’s some direct gamemaker lineage with how she makes character controllers but with a little spice from her later works like towerfall.
22 Likes
im discounting mario knight celeste mega metroid for variable height cowardice . circus charlie…ghosts & goblins…spelunker. … close your eyes cross your fingers… you pressed the button. you chose the direction. now we see the consequences.
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i love ghosts n’ goblins – single arc jump but they give you a double jump. how fun! you get to change your mind once per jump.
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ghouls n ghosts yes but ghosts n goblins (1985) u just get the one. Not to discount the ghouls n ghosts addition because it does a great job of giving you an out that doubles as a way to impulsively panic into hanging yourself.
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I originally tried Hollow Knight mainly because of how few bug games there are but this aspect wears away quite quickly by the end. From what I’ve seen of Silksong the same things that frustrated me in Hollow Knight seem to return so I might try it much later but I just want nicely animated bugs. I do wish some of the designs used a bit more of the cow. Insects have really interesting and unique body shapes and some characters are really just a formless black blob/stick figure with a mask on
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I’m not sure I’ve seen a Metroidvania with a lot of momentum and commitment in movement TBH - it would really get in the way of map exploration and backtracking. It’s why Castlevania went from being THE commitment-heavy platformer series to THE commitment-free platformer series
Silksong’s interesting in that regard since it lets you keep the momentumless movement but asks you way more for it. The divekick is impractical compared to the HK pogo stick, while the air dash plunges you immediately downward and it doesn’t have i-frames (as far as I can tell) unlike the standard HK air dash which moves you perfectly horizontally letting you avoid all damage and take a little breather. Excited to see what other movement abilities have been « ruined »
Oh and regarding the stance that gives the pogo stick back - you lose a little range in the process which is probably not worth it compared to learning the divekick
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I think Nintendo never really abandoning Mario and the availability of robust rom hacking tools (and later Mario’s Maker) has a lot to do with it too. Maybe not as much as the other issues already raised but it’s definitely a factor I’d say. I hope no one already said this sorry if so I’m half asleep!! Also didn’t they add the double jump in super ghouls n ghosts I don’t remember it in either of the first two but it’s been a long ass time since I played any of them
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no yeah thats also what i was thinkng when this was brought up. we no longer have mega man so we gotta make mega man at home
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it also sucks for traversal and the animation is kind of slow. i immediately unequipped it so i could dash cancel divekicks again.
super ghouls n ghosts was by far my most played game in the series and yes it seems to have overwritten my memory for the earlier ones. no double jump until super.
3 Likes
I haven’t gotten the pogo ability, but I do have the crescent attack, which also replaces the dive kick, though with a much riskier short range downward attack (it’s great for pogoing off of floating balloon things but your hurtbox overlaps with the attack too much for pogoing off of enemies). I’m not sure how many different stances there are to collect but I kinda like the way the movement and attacking can be customized so far, with the crescent one having crazy reach but terrible attack speed.
The savage beastfly is so hard… His attack patterns really aren’t so bad, but he hits like a truck, and when he starts summoning guys things get chaotic fast.
Every other day I check the game’s Steam forums to try and get a grasp on the game and each time I end up feeling both dumber and angrier, what a toxic wasteland.
I think I’m gonna just wait for the game’s first patch to see if they rebalance anything as from afar some of the mentioned pain points (every enemy doing 2 points of damage, lots of bosses requiring lengthy runbacks) do sound like possible side effects of the game starting life as an expansion and could end up smoothed out a bit.
Probably better to wait until people have finished the game before I ask this, but how does the difficulty compare to Nine Sols so far? Not sure I feel like butting my head against the same kind of wall as the bosses in that game quite so soon
I’m not that far into Silksong, but I did play all of Nine Sols. When I think back to how hard Nine Sols was after the amount of time I’ve put into Silksong, I’d say Nine Sols was a lot harder.
I certainly wouldn’t call Silksong easy though!
4 Likes
i also think nine sols is harder. i died soooo many times on the first boss in nine sols and have not had that experience w/ the first 5ish bosses in silksong. i one shot the majority of them and died i think 4 times on the most recent one i beat.
haven’t bought this yet, but i can’t believe one of the early game areas is called “bone bottom”
3 Likes
Nine Sols felt so much harder, but I don’t know how much of thatwas due to Nine Sols being all about the parry mechanic all the time. It is plenty hard but in different ways, largely in climbing using the divekick and bosses being able to eat lots and lots of damage.
1 Like
I’m increasingly noticing a lot of the two mask damage was in Ant Hell and I found the area after to be much less less damage heavy. I think this game has areas that can vary in difficulty a lot, but that one in particular is kind of a choke point in the early game in a way other stuff doesn’t seem to be.
Would you recommend going through bird hell or ant hell first? I’ve got both open and neither one feels good to be in.