So, uhh, I think you'll learn more just by playing Radiant Silvergun and thinking about what the game is forcing you to do, forcing you to struggle with, and thinking about how it shows you that struggle than you will by mapping out all the inputs.
True that. I'm not going to find any substitute for physically playing a game, I'm just thinking about how I might communicate this action to someone who's unwilling or unable to play it. For instance, now that I'm working on a game with a team, if I have a boss fight in mind, what would be the most efficient way to relay that to the programmer? The only way to get 1:1 results would be for me to animate the action by hand with some basic shapes, but that's time consuming. I tried
sketching out the motion- game's basically just Castlevania with 8-way whipping and a grappling hook- but there's no telling how much is going to be lost in translation. I had no shorthand for velocity, so anything relating to how an object's speed changes over time would need to be explained in text, like how the boss smoothly slides from side to side in puddle form.
I started looking into motion graphics for a solution (I was convinced my infatuation with Radiant Silvergun was telling me mograph was my
true calling anyway). The way After Effects controls velocity is with a graph, where a change in height indicates a change in speed. It isn't the simplest thing to read, but then I went looking for an introduction to the speed graph to post here and saw that
had broken it down really well in the first 3 minutes. Maybe I could just scribble tiny curves like those everywhere? If there's any possibility of a simple catch-all notation for game movement, the solution's probably in here somewhere.
But yeah, I sort of cooled off to the idea after posting the thread. I'm still curious about seeing a visual translation of the movement in this particular game, but it wouldn't be useful, just neat. Inertia is super important, glad you brought it up. Love that you used three paragraphs to break down three seconds of Mario gameplay. That's the resolution of scrutiny I want to see, because we really are making a lot of complex decisions on a millisecond basis. Hate to bring it back to shmups, but it just occurred to me that the genre thrives on bullet hell with minimal input because every movement is swamped in exciting psychological noise: I find many deaths are the result of botched inputs because the visuals sparked a
left in my thumb when I really wanted
right. Hardcore players swear by joysticks, I guess because having to use your entire wrist to actuate movement minimizes the likelihood of twitch error. A shmup with ice physics would be
anathema to those players, but man, wouldn't that be neat? What if the player was allowed to move freely about an area larger than the screen? What if the screen rotated? It would take so little to put a spin on the formula. Ice Shmup could be really fun.
Changing it up now because I like the idea of deconstructing games on a case-by-case basis. Take the original Tomb Raiders and Croc: Legend of the Gobboes- games I love that were well received at the time, but the tank controls wouldn't go over well today. The disconnect of movement not matching the character is a powerful turnoff, as if Lara's a car that needs to go into reverse to line up every jump. But I
like that weight. I like how you have to steer Croc like you're banking an aircraft, that the cobblestone path textures project and
anticipate the movements you're meant to make. That the simplest act of grabbing a row of crystals requires intense focus on my part makes it the most engaging collectathon of all time to me. I think there's still a place for that type of control if we could contextualize it properly, contrast is part of appeal.
Oh and yeah, Bangai-O's a good time! I think. I played the N64 version years ago, it's not fresh in my head. Actually meant to start playing the Dreamcast version recently but got sidetracked, gotta get back on that.