next »

[PogueSquadron]

Was just checking that out on YT, and yeah, that's more of what I'm getting at.  The game isn't divided by numbered levels but is a continuous experience.  I'd love to see a more conventional platformer that adopts some of those ideas for some reason.  Almost like a Mario level that never ends (but has checkpoints along the way).

[Core Xii]

Seiklus have continuous world.

It doesn't scroll fully, though. Areas still have transitions.

I also wouldn't count Half-Life 2 because, although continuous, it isn't seamless. The loading areas are very obvious (oh look, a narrow, zig-zagging corridor!) and clunky (freeze! stuttering sound!). Halo streams the levels so it doesn't have loading areas, but the game at large is separated into chapters.

One example I'd like to add is Donkey Kong 64. It does have screen fades in certain transitions, but even the "world map" is a fully playable space, i.e. spatially consistent. And the levels are huge. Super Mario 64 is similar except the star-select screen when entering a level is very disruptive.

I... can't think of any game that is both continuous and seamless, and without cutscenes.

[Molten_]

Core Xii, that is one thing I really liked about Donkey Kong 64. The world felt really huge because of the transitions between locations and areas ... too bad I didn't really like the level design all that much. its kinda sad because compared to Banjo Kazooie (And even to an extent Tooie ... although I'm not quite sure if that came before or after DK64) everything felt really static and empty.

Now what if RETRO STUDIOS made a sequel to DK64

[FrankieSmileShow]

Oh hey! I've been working on a platformer like this for 6 months now, for the action52 competition, non human. Its one long continuous level with bosses along the way, with scenery changes and all (It starts from a forest outside, goes through a city, then a cave, then an hi-tech underground base)

I am not sure the continuous nature improves the game, I think it might actually be taking away from it. I think it makes the game feel like it drags on for too long.
In a simple linear platformer kind of game, I think the feeling of progress is lessened when the levels structure is taken out. Levels serve as milestones, a way to measure how far you are into the game and how much you have left (even if it doesn't tell you how many levels there are, I think people generally have some number to reach in mind). I think that if you take the levels out, you need to find some other element to compensate for this loss of structure.

In my game I tried to compensate for this by adding many "milestones" in the game usually in the form of bosses or recognizable level sections, or to make the scenery change as much as possible. I also tried to put in a map display. The map display is completely redundant and useless, but I thought it might give you an idea of your progress in the game to see your path travelled so far. I am not sure I succeeded in compensating for the lack of structure, its hard to tell. Maybe my game really is just too long or samey after a short while and the structure has nothing to do with it, or maybe its a mix of both.

My game is made in game maker. To make the huge level I simply made a bunch of rooms with end areas that are identical to the beginning of the following room, so I change the room for the next when the player reaches the end, transporting all visible enemies, bullets, special effects etc with you in the next. It is sometimes noticeable when the change occurs; in some larger rooms you can notice the game has a slight hiccup. But when you don't know where the switch takes place its very hard to notice.

I also placed sawtooths(one-way passages, like doors shutting behind you, or a steep cliff you can only climb on one direction) in the levels so you cant go back into the previous room once you crossed into the new area. You could of course allow people to move back into previous rooms, but some other details of my game made this awkward to do.

This also allowed me to make cool things like, at hard difficulty level, new level sections are added in between existing ones. I could even make some rooms different every time you play, picking from like 8 different possible ones when you finish the previous room. In a game with a level structure it doesn't seem like anything special, but in a seemingly continuous game its a neat effect, its unexpected.

Obviously this is kind of a terrible way to do it, but I am a little limited with game maker. Its much better to have the levels "stream" in front of you as you progress and then clear out behind you. You end up with less of the level loaded at one time, and you dont need to fuck around with level ends and beginning getting them to look identical, getting them to match.

I'm not sure how I would go about with the streaming solution in game maker myself, is GM reasonably fast with changing tiles dynamically within a room? Maybe id make one gigantic room with all tile layers invisible, and one "current" tile layer which would have tiles moved to it from the invisible ones as the hero moves? Or maybe that would be just as slow as having it all visible... (also maybe Game Maker already does pretty much this under the hood for tiles outside of the view?? And they would still all be in the memory so it wouldnt help that much...)

[PogueSquadron]

Yeah I suppose it would have to depend on the length of the game and the pacing...perhaps such a structure may not benefit a game that is incredibly long.  For me, I'd be interested to try more of these games.  I'm the kind of person, for instance, who would rather wait for a TV show to come out on DVD before I watched it, so I could watch it all within a couple of days.  It's definitely a big reason it was hard for me to put Portal down.  Yeah, there were loading times and elevator sequences, but the game just seemed to keep going and going (despite its short length).

[iffi]

If someone made a scrolling version of Knytt Stories (as opposed to being separated into individual rooms) I think it would qualify as continuous.
It would be pretty simple to make a small platformer continuous, and most likely it's been done before - at a very small scale it would essentially be a one-level platformer.
I'm not sure how great the advantages of making a platformer continuous are, but it would introduce challenges such as transitioning between different sections smoothly, avoiding the feeling of the game dragging on too long, and the task of streaming the level data or however you choose to implement the continuous structure.

Yeah I suppose it would have to depend on the length of the game and the pacing...perhaps such a structure may not benefit a game that is incredibly long.  For me, I'd be interested to try more of these games.  I'm the kind of person, for instance, who would rather wait for a TV show to come out on DVD before I watched it, so I could watch it all within a couple of days.  It's definitely a big reason it was hard for me to put Portal down.  Yeah, there were loading times and elevator sequences, but the game just seemed to keep going and going (despite its short length).

But DVDs still have breaks between each episode, even though they're drastically shortened compared to watching a show on TV. It's not as if you have to wait a week between level transitions anyway (at least, hopefully you don't). You can still convey a continuous experience without making it truly continuous, though admittedly it could be enhanced if it were continuous.

[PogueSquadron]

I'm thinking that the advantages of a 'continuous' game (wish I had a better term for this) would be more evident in a 3D game.  In a 2D game, the jump from map screen to gameplay isn't as jarring as the jump from a 2D map to a 3D world.  It would be cool to run around in a 3D world that seems really cohesive, rather than jump out to a map mode that holds things together.

[siiseli]

http://www.mojang.com/notch/mario/

[snowyowl]

In BioShock, aren't there areas where you can see the rest of the city through the windows? (I've never played it, so I can't be sure, and I think there are areas where you have to wait for the game to load, but still...)

[johnnoz]

I remember seeing a modified version of Knytt that did this.
The original game was actually all in one big map but the camera was locked to a room by room display for aesthetic purposes (this version had obvious gaps between different tilesets and such).

[studioslug]

cave story kinda does that

[man of doom]

I'm visualising this, and I think in certain games the transition is important to differentiate the game areas and progress through the game. Imagining Sonic 3 for example (though it has smooth transitions between Acts), it has transition animations such as falling down a hole or being shot out of a cannon but still has blackouts between zones. I think these are important because it gives the player the feeling they are really moving onto the next segment of the game, and making significant progress, whereas without these tiny intermissions I feel things could start to feel as though they have been just going on and on. Also adding in extended transitions between Zones would reduce the immediacy of the gameplay.

However this is just imagining it with a 2d Sonic game. I think perhaps it could work in a shorter game as long it was possible to handle changes in scenery smoothly and without excessive downtime or travel time. For instance a lot of platformers use quite strongly varied scenarios, connecting all of these together in a logical way so as to maintain continuity could be quite difficult.

 From a technical perspective in GameMaker, I'd like to add that seeing as Room Transitions only take 1 frame, if you were to have the player do some specific animation at the end of each 'level' where control is momentarily removed then you could probably transition immediately following that and with correct alignment move from room to room without any apparent interruption.

[J-Snake]

Yep, some Metroid games (let's take Metroid2) and also Super Metroid is actually the game you are looking for (after landind on Zebes).


Only the level-portion-transitions show everytime black screen but technically they are seemless transition from art-tech perspective. I remember there was a hack that blends the black cover out by each transition.

P.S. I see metroid was already mentioned, what shouldn't be a surprise. Probably it goes unnoticed because "platformer" is often wired in the head to linear mario platfrorming?