Mobility Mastery #3 - Wall Sliding versus Wall jumping

    The difference and when to know when to use one over the other for any given level design at hand. For Super Meat boy I got the idea for wall sliding and not only using the wall jumping mechanic. The difference has been made clear to me why I should be using wall jumping for a Megaman clone at the end of the day.

Wall sliding

Wall sliding is one of my favorite mechanics because it encourages the player to time when to get off the wall and having to deal with a build up of speed, usually paired with wall jumping. However, wall sliding only works when the given levels are large/ more open in design, not so small and cramped to deal with enemies.

Now traditional slow down your descent wall sliding isn't bad to have for a Megaman like game but it's meant more for timing/ slow down of play. When performing wall sliding you're more worried about timing yourself and your movement as in the level is more of an enemy than the enemies being a threat. This design would be great if you ever created a large world game to give the players some unique mobility mechanics to work with.

Wall sliding works better with more floaty gameplay and meant to be more of a main form of traversing when walls come up. From my experience, tight wall sliding mechanics are tough to do.

Wall jumping

Wall jumping takes more inputs, more precise movements can be made and has a lot more flexibility for dealing with enemies when trying to get to higher places, you have it where the enemies you encounter are helping you get up spaces.

Keep in mind Wall jumping comes in multiple different flavors. Execution wall jumping where you're pressing the input of wall jumping at the correct time like in Bunny Must Die Chelsa and the Seven Devils with a focus on getting each input down every with more than a simple input. It feels more like execution characters from fighting games in this regard.

Megaman wall jump your vanilla wall jump system that you can't go wrong with, it's simple and straight forward with using the same wall.

Mario Wall jump; push you off of the wall, this is because more levels are larger and want you using other mobility options once you're done wall jumping off the walls and go into another mobility tool, however outside of that this can be useful to stop players from abusing the same wall jump over and over to avoid certain challenges/ platforms.

Wall jumping is shown to work with less floaty gameplay and meant more to be a support gameplay tool rather than an outright gameplay tool.

Conclusion

Use some form of a system that's more focused on tighter movement or more loose movement for vertical gameplay.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Psychological manipulation #2 Big numbers

 This is a fine balancing act for players but the goal of the matter is to keep going for the big numbers and keep the big numbers with them getting bigger, and bigger then you get the picture. With this not only having one set of numbers get bigger but having the other numbers get bigger as well. You need some form of system to keep the players wanting the numbers to get bigger. For idle clicker games you use the reset system to get the player coming back; with the MMORPG system you scale down those numbers in updates so you can keep numbers getting bigger or use the shared power system for the players to use. Personally I like using an XP reset system; once the XP hits max for the level, the XP subtracts from the XP cost bringing it down to 0 and as thus allowing that big number of XP to still feel big. Then you might be asking about the player leveling up which there is always the COD reset level system where once the level hits a big enough number you have it where the progress...
Read more

Power Creep

 Power creep can be both a good and a bad thing. With power creep you have it where players are being fed more powerful items or cards where they ditch old equipment for the new toys and make it so players will actually use it. On that same note you're trading the learning the items/ understanding how to make oneself more powerful through strats by relying on your given powerful new toys and making players throw them away again once more toys do show up. It's a useful investment strat for card games but does get boring for games where the only thing you have to look forward to is bigger more powerful numbers instead of different strats/ tactics you've never seen or used before with the bigger numbers feeling meaningless. Person experience; with Yu-Gi-Oh playing the rogue format was more fun even if I lost because I wasn't losing to the FTK format and actually scaled down in power with having fun seeing different strats/ tactics, that the limitations that were self impos...
Read more

Deck Size matters

 Small decks These kind of games make it where the game is being given a more consistent/ predictable strategy. The outcome being much more predictable but having it where players are dealing with mill and burn strats far too often making them busted. Large decks These kind of games make mill/ burn strats basically useless but have less reliance on consistent drawing what you want; however in a game where search abilities exist with the more search power the more options that open up and remove the down side of having a larger deck becomes.
Read more