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[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?