Game feel is, I believe, the single most important aspect of any game, and yet it is often overlooked in favor of visuals, audio, storytelling, and any other number of easily communicated features. As today’s blog is the first to document actual development progress, hopefully that will give you some idea of the importance I place on game feel.

As I mentioned in my first entry, Gunmetal Arcadia is going to be built off the technology that I developed for Super Win the Game. That code gives me a good foundation for doing many of the sorts of things I would need to do in any 2D platformer, and it would be wasteful to write those systems again. Much of it was originally written for You Have to Win the Game, with a few subtle changes made to retain the same game feel for Super Win in the context of a different screen resolution and aspect ratio. But it’s important that Gunmetal Arcadia not be identical to those games in terms of game feel, and with that in mind, I’ve been making some adjustments to movement and jumping physics recently.

The biggest change I’ve made is to the jump height. In Super Win, you can clear three blocks in a single jump (where one block is 16×16 pixels). In Gunmetal Arcadia, I’ve lowered the jump height to just under two blocks, but you also get a small height increase while walking which allows you to clear two blocks. Increasing jump height with lateral speed is a fairly common trope among old school platformers, but it was one that I avoided in the Win the Game series because I felt it was antithetical to the precise platforming those games require.

In reducing the jump height, I also found it necessary to reduce the jump duration by nearly 30% to avoid floatiness. (I’ve blogged in the past about how the constants that govern jump physics can be derived from a number of sources; I prefer to establish height and duration and derive velocity and gravity from these.)

I’ve finally made peace with non-parabolic jumps and implemented higher gravity while falling. This is an old trick dating back at least as far as Super Mario Bros., and it serves a few purposes. It makes the character feel heavier, and it gets you back on the ground faster after you’ve peaked, which is usually what you want. It also has the side effect of reducing the horizontal distance you can jump, which isn’t necessarily good or bad as long as the levels are tuned properly.

In Super Win, there is no momentum except when walking on ice, which is to say, the character’s movement speed normally corresponds 1:1 to the player’s input. Press left and you immediately move left at full speed. Press right and you immediately change directions, regardless of whether you’re on the ground or in the air. In Gunmetal, I’ve added a little bit of momentum to grounded movement and a significant amount while in the air. This reduces the fidelity of movement relative to input, but it gives the character a more tangible, weighty feel.

Lastly, I’ve lowered the maximum walking speed by about 10%. It’s not a significantly noticeable change, but it complements the other changes I’ve made. And though I haven’t yet drawn the player character, it’s highly likely he or she will have a larger sprite and collision box than Super Win‘s Wayfarer, which will affect the character’s perceived speed and weight.

The goal of these changes is to give the player character a better sense of physicality, which is something that I hope to maintain throughout the development of Gunmetal Arcadia. This game is not about precise platforming as Super Win was; it’s about combat and adventuring, and it’s important that the moment-to-moment game feel support that premise. I’m not done tuning it yet; likely I won’t be for a very long time, but I’m confident in the direction I’m headed.