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[NMcCoy]

I've got a vague design notion I'm working on, but I wanted to bring this particular topic up for discussion.

Premise: Starting from the very beginning of the game, the player character has an unrestricted flight ability. By "unrestricted", I mean always available, and with no inherent altitude/flight-time limitation. Additionally, for the purposes of this discussion I want to assume that any fixed terrain obstacle can be avoided by the use of this ability - there aren't walls that are too high to fly over, and the gameplay generally won't be in any tightly confined spaces. This discussion is intended to be applicable to both 2D and 3D gameplay.

Questions: What challenges do we provide for the player? What might the game's goals look like? Which conventions of the platformer idiom can be preserved, which can be adapted to the premise, and which are simply irrelevant?

~~~~~

Initial thoughts:
A very common task in a platformer is "reach a particular destination". This is the most common task in the Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog games, for example. Without substantial modification, this task would appear to run the risk of becoming trivial.

A primary theme of platform games seems to be navigating around obstacles. The key premise of this discussion is that obstacles can be avoided relatively easily. Is it even meaningful to consider a game with such a premise a "platformer"?

[Xion]

you could have a few sparse indoor areas that, while they don't disallow flight, limit its usefulness.
Or maybe have obstacles in the air as well as on the ground. Like, where the ground might be walls and enemies and stuff, the air could have minefields in it, or certain enemies (like dragons/flying robots/whatever) that come after you only in flight.

you could also have incentives for staying grounded (as well as for flying) like certain items or specials that are only found on the ground.

[salade]

actually, i'd imagine it something much like your avatar!

a game like this would be wonderful. flying around freely, soaring through clouds over hills and green pastures, mabye swooping down for a drop in on some mission.

i'd imagine goals for this game to be something like a quest, an epic if you will. the image of perseus flying off to confront medusa always comes to my mind when I think about how a video game could have flying (i've thought of it before). also, the whole image of little fly vs. big towering behemoth for bosses.

I would play a game like what you described

[Kneecaps]

The key premise of this discussion is that obstacles can be avoided relatively easily.

This sounds like Knytt, but with flying.  Games that are about exploration and wonder can be just as entertaining as challenging games, if not more so. 

[ortoslon]

You can make flight controls less direct than controls for walking and jumping. Flywrench: The Platformer? Why not.

[Wilson Saunders]

You pose an interesting question here. I remember back in Super Mario World with the yellow cape; I would celebrate any level that had enough room to take and high ceilings as I could fly over the entire level ignoring its obstacles.

I guess one of the things you should ask yourself is why even have platforms if you can just fly where you need to go? You may end up making a side view flying game in the vein of Nights: into Dreams:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiGHTS_into_Dreams...

If you want to stick with more platform oriented game play, ie running and jumping. Consider having negative attributes to flying other than a limit. For example it could be really hard to change direction in the air, thus requiring a landing to effectively change direction. If you want to be more overt about it you could spawn enemies if the player is in the air too long or goes too high. Further more you could change the goal from reaching a certain location to defeating a major enemy or group of enemies. Alternately you could make the player accomplish certain things within a time limit using an interesting flight dynamic.

[Lynx]

Thexder has a giant robot that can transform into an aircraft and a humanoid form.  Both have different characteristics that are useful in different parts of the level; the aircraft only ever shoots forward (in the direction it's going) where the giant robot's gun is 'smart' and ranges over all destructable objects nearby.  You can thus design levels with barriers and enemies that are more easily defeated by one form or another.

The important part is to have distinctions between the user's capabilities on the air and in the ground.

[agj]

Seems like you want a challenging game. Then the goal of each stage should not be to simply reach the exit, that is ways to the right after a bunch of enemies and traps, but maybe the levels are labyrinths. Much like in the original Knytt, in which you need good spatial perception in order to find the pieces of the ship.

[Inanimate]

Okay, I'll write my multiple ideas:

For an example, you make it an exploration game, through a mysterious land! You wake up, maybe, in a world unlike your own... and you discover, amazingly, that you can fly! Just a game of wonder, and awe.

Least Challenge: No challenges! just let exploration guide you, and learn of the tale of the land. (That would be a fun game.) the goal would probably just be to return to your world.

Lesser Challenge: Similar design, but now you have bigger obstacles, labyrinths, a larger, more complex, map, and lots of indoor areas. Maybe floaty controls too.

Moderate Challenge: Add enemies, that attack you. You ignore the other additions of indoors, obstacles, the like. The goal is to kill the monsters, AND get back home.

Greater Challenge: Keep both, but lighten up on the indoor areas, mazes, and make controls a tad tighter.

Great Challenge: Make everything... TO THE MAX!

[NMcCoy]

More thoughts: If the primary task involves completing mission objectives such as "destroy all the enemies in the area", the freedom of motion can become non-problematic. More specifically, not giving the player ranged attacks and having most enemies be on the ground gives them an incentive not to fly too far from the action.

Potential challenge - get close to a fortified area in order to take out a target while avoiding ground-to-air defenses. Tangential thought: Has anyone ever made a "tower offense" game?

Another challenge: The player must defend a specific location from waves of attackers, and has to manage their balance of attacking enemies vs. flying to engage other more pressing targets.

[Zaratustra]

Wasn't Aquaria this, technically speaking?

[Zaphos]

Wasn't Aquaria this, technically speaking?

No, aquaria had enclosed spaces generally.

[Ego_Shiner]

The biggest challenge would be keeping it as a platformer and not as a more shmupish game. You could go with a smw style flight where it is challenging but hardly limited at all aside from the startup. You could also have incentives to stay on the ground as others have suggested, though that might be a bit of a pain when you just want to fly but have to keep checking the ground for powerups or whatever. I think the best would be to have the flight heavily affected by gravity and somewhat challenging to control, but still really smooth and fun.

[Mikademus]

Just introduce obstacles suitable for free flight. First, make flight somewhat quirky so that starting and stopping isn't immediate, if you build speed then it will also take some time to come to a stop, so walking might usually be preferable. The place giant fans and air-streams and pesky birds and blowing clouds and floating gravity wells and shit in the game and you're set. Then weather, damn, that's really annoying when flyin', ya know? Snow makes you increasingly heavy and weights you down and forces you to the ground to shake it off (annoying when you're over that chasm!) and rain too, but less than snow since it doesn't stick to you.

[PureQuestion]

Well, strictly speaking, the "platforming" in it's general sense wouldn't exist.  The actual game would be simple enough to implement, but doing it effectively would certainly be difficult. There would need to be some restraints- you can only create so much map. The specified lack of enclosed areas does complicate it. Inside a building, walls can be used to make a challenge quite easily. Slippery controls would be a potential cause for challenge, but I've always found this sort of challenge to be really fake feeling. I want to lose because I genuinely lost, not because the controls are slippery and unintuitive. Notably, it would be easy to die from gaining too much speed and something coming into view and killing you before you can react. That said, flight would generally have friction issues, so slippery physics wouldn't by any stretch be unusual. There is a lot of potential for such a game.

[genericuser]

The thing about having free flight IRL is that you'd get easily confused. Try opening up Google Maps/Earth, get an overview of your city, and then try to find your own house.
Now, imagine having to do that while moving in the air, at high altitude.

...if you could add that feeling/challenge to a game, it'd be a pretty neat way of discouraging the player from flying everywhere.

[FishyBoy]

The problem with truly free flight is that it sort of cancels it's platformer status.

To keep the whole platformer idea of negotiating terrain, you could have your game be about your free flying character helping out another, more limited character? Maybe make some sort of important relationship between the two, like the grounded character having useful weaponry for fighting off monsters you wouldn't be able to on your own?

[astrospoon]

Or possibly make all the enemies ground based with AI platform movement. And if eliminating them is the objective, you'll have to come down to fight them. Kind of like the megaman 2 "dragon vs. megaman" fight, but you are the dragon.

I mean, superman has unlimited flight, but lets be honest, there isn't much going on up there... He has to come down to the ground to interact with everyone else for the most part. The "platforming" aspect could end up more like pilot wings or something, landing in different locations accurately. Flying is the easy part, its the landing that's the bitch