What MAKES a good platform game?

The platform games thread has been fun and interesting, but it seemed to me the original question was lost - that is, what makes a good platform game, as opposed to just what your favorites are.

So. ...

What makes a good platform game? What are the qualities? What engine features does it have? WHY is it good? What's the magic formulae?

No unexpected Death

A feeling of adventure - a decent sized play area with something in each area that's different and worth seeing - e.g: Individual baddies rather than re-use of the same characters.

Adventure elements where you have to use your brain a bit - e.g: Get the flaming torch to scare the monkeys into the path of the spider so it eats them not you and you can pass.... not 'collect another key to open another door'

No sudden stops and starts which I suppose is a result of smooth movement and good level design. Cavestory is a great example of this.

Being able to do alot with basic controls is good too. Fury of the Furries was brilliant at this.

here's a few, I've got *plenty* more (I can't give them all away yet...) ;-)

- fairly large main character.
- fast arcade like feel and smoothness
- solid feeling player.
- large array of character moves.
- good enemy AI
- no pixel perfect jumps (although near pixel perfect is acceptable for harder levels).
- no falling through platforms.
- should all platforms be solid (i.e. bang head if jumping up into them) or should you be able to jump up through them and land on them?
- proper decent multi-directional scrolling which only kicks in as you move out of the centre area of the screen.
- walk up slopes
- gravity/friction/collisions
- non-tiled looking level (not essential)
- moving platforms
- money/shop/upgrades
- experience points
- plot/cut-scenes/comic book
- multi-layer graphics (background/parallax, current, foreground etc).
- powerups and downgrades
- really important to have a great feeling of exploration and secrets and hidden areas etc.

I release I've fallen into the trap of describing features and not what makes a platformer good, but done right, the above things well certainly add to a good platform experience.

camera system is what lets most 3d platform games down, where you miss jumps etc. apart from that people above have it covered.

Pete

I'm currently rewriting one of my old platform games for Linux, So I'll be watching this thread carefully! OO

But to be honest, I think Greys got it nearly all nailed, but a nice mix of enemies is a must in my eyes, with appropriate AI to match!

Dabz

What is good enemy AI when it comes to platform games then?

I'm surprised no one has mentioned platforms yet!

I like an expansive gameworld and a sense of exploration, as found in Wonderboy in Monster World, some of the newer Castlevanias and the Metroid games.

A fluidity and smoothness of movement. It's difficult to explain this - it's the 'feel' you get in the best 2d Mario games, for example, that comes from the implementation of a finely honed control scheme combined with appropriate physics. The player character must feel neither too weighty nor too floaty; there must not be too much inertia nor too little.

Bright and colourful art.

Infectious, melodic tunes.

No leaps of faith or movable platforms that send you falling down to the start of the level if you miss a jump.

A liberal sprinkling of save points and/or plenty of continues.

Creative environments. No tedious ice, fire worlds etc.

I personally like a decent story and RPG elements (for example an inventory/shops/NPCs you can communicate with), but some people might say that these things spoil the purity of a great platformer.

For me, Donkey Kong Country pulls off all the best elements of a classic platform game.

My ingredients (in order of importance):

Controls
***************************
THE most crucial part to get right.
Not just the 'feel' but also the responsiveness.
And no having to wrestle with the game character because of bad collison detection with the levels

Level design
***************************
The second most important part. A well designed level with nice graphics, good enemy positions, hidden areas, will keep you coming back for more.

Characters and objects
***************************
Lots of good platformers have memorable characters. Not just to look at, but how they move and what it takes to destroy them.


Music/Sfx
***************************
Music which fits the level can set the right tone. Be it racey, ambient, eerie etc..
Again, some nice spot effects can add impact to the fun of defeating an enemy, collecting a special coin, revealing a secret area, gaining an extra life.

Any game which makes me say, "Just one more go!"

I'd second Jim's first three items as being the key ingredients, but they're all equally important. (I'd almost always turn any music off).

In particular, I believe "character" is very important, but is really hard to get right. This doesn't just mean the lead character, but applies to the whole "look & feel" - it needs to be consistent, and high quality. But in terms of the main character, a wide variety of good quality animation is needed. And not just for in-play activities: a variety of humorous wait animations that kick in fairly quickly if you sit idle for any time is always good for building character.

You're right about the importance of character. You make a valid point about the whole look and feel needing to be consistent.

Narrowing that down to character as it relates to personality, I think that it is extremely difficult to create genuinely appealing characters. Too often, characters are boring, cookie-cutter "cool dude with attitude" types, you know what I mean? Sonic rip-offs with the annoying teen-reaching-puberty attitude turned up to the max. The rules of character creation for hack designers seem to be:

1) Pick a random animal (let's say a mongoose).
2) Give him bright trainers, shades and a big toothy grin.
3) Make him spit out annoying wisecracks at every turn and use lots of kiddy slang.
4) Give him an unoriginal gimmic. He's a skateboarder! He's a surfer! He's a ninja! Yawn.
5) Give him an equally unoriginal name based on what type of animal/creature he is, the skills he possesses or some action he can do. Or maybe all three (like, er, Speedster the Ninja Mongoose?).

*shudder*

I think that, as a general rule, if certain personality-types and mannerisms annoy you in real life then they will make your game characters seem annoying rather than appealing too.

Platforms that move from point to point should have some sort of mark or track, so you can tell when its going to turn around. I hate it when a moving platform suddenly changes direction and you had no way of knowing unless you have played it and died on it a few times already.

Good platforms. Obviously.

Hey! Zool was excellent!

I think interaction and/or sense of speed is what makes a good platform game.

In the first category good games that come to mind are: Fury of the Furries and Bubba'n'Stix - because of the seemingly large ammount of options you had when solving problems.

In the later category good games that come to mind are: Wiz'n'Liz and Jazzy Jackrabbit, because of the hectic game pace. Also the fact that both where multiplayer games may have had some effect.

Some things I liked about games like Sonic were that they featured a lot of interesting moving things that you could interact with - swinging platforms, spinning cogs, a pinball machine, speed accelerators, springs, twirly tubes, high speed tunnels, super-fast slopes and loop-de-loops, it had so many cool things you could do.

As I said in the other thread, Kingdom Hearts.

Kingdom Hearts makes a good platform game. =]

A platform game has to have platforms of all sorts!
Also the cam system has to be good so that there are no unexpected deaths.

Well, knowing how I feel about platform games, I'd have to say that there needs to be a level chock full of excitement in every game. I mean, some fun puzzles in every level, like trying to use your noggin in order to complete a part of the level. A platform can take on all sorts of genres, like strategy, RPG, shooter, puzzle, you name it.

It doesn't matter if it's 2D or 3D, it all comes down to a character that you view in 3rd person for 3D or as a tile sprite in 2D, and that the puzzles can be somewhat easy, yet fun to follow... Also, the enemy AI needs to be that which can be a challenge, yet still be easy for the player to overcome. All sorts of things like that.

You also need traps of some sorts, like chasms, lava pits, slime pits, spiked floors/crushing ceilings, etc... It's things like these that you should consider for an overall great experience. Just be creative, learn from Shigeru Miyamoto, or that guy who made Sonic (can't think of his name now)...

However, it's great to know that platforming is still alive and well, too many other genres of games are just dominating the wazoo out of the industry, and not too many of the fun genres like this anymore. What a world of gaming we live in now, eh?

Come to think of it, was Max Payne somewhat like a platformer in its own right? I mean, it does have some elements that make it one...

Did it have any, um, platforms? I can't remember it featuring much platform jumping action... Lot's of bullet time and gunplay does not a platformer make.

here's a question? Is Tomb Raider a platform game? It has platforms and 3rd person and exploration etc...?

Super Mario World (2D) on the SNES and Banjo Kazooie (3D) are probably my most favorite most admired platform games. These both still have me inspired, the positioning of each element in the game and how it affects the game play is almost perfect in both cases. Careful attention has been paid to the charatcers capabilities in each section of the game, and the learning curves are excellent.

Having interesting new characters and abilities introduced throughout the game is essential for keepin g the long term interest of the player.

The players goals and challenges also have to increase as the game progresses, but not to a point where there is too much choice and not a clear way forwards.


IPete2.

Some more ideas:

Save points *right* befire any extremely difficult bits.

No point in having to redo a whole junk of easy/repetetive stuff that you just did once but died after because a big green sandman ate you up after you opened a doorway. (Or like POP Revolutions again, you do a hard bit but cant see where to go after beating everyone up, so you jump at a suspicious pole thing, and die. It takes you back to the previous puzzle!)

yeah, even save points in multi-part boss battles too :-)

Banjo Kazooie was rediculously hard! Must have gone through at least 3 controllers on that one.

Another favorite of mine was Conkers Bad Fur Day because it was hilarious (funny), and offered new concepts (like urinating while intoxicated to put out fire imps, and the epic battle versus the Great Mighty Poo which uses music to interesting effect) that I hadn't seen before (or since really). A shame they lost the plot about half way through tho'. Ending is quite cool tho', but playing through the last three movie rip offs (sorry spoofs) to get there, is a bit of a bore.

I think I may have to grab a copy of that, FD! Sounds hilarious :-)

Seems to me also 2d platformers at least used to tout how many frames of sprite animation they had, which meant lots of movement, moves, and ways of interacting with things. So the more frames the better, probably.

A good thing of platform games is also the secret hidden rooms, (superfrog and zool spring to mind) where you bash through some wall or go through some hard-to-reach spot that lands you in a secret bonus area where you get lots of goodies/munchies/bonuses.

Also another good feature is always the `extra life` or other usually hard-to-get features/tools/weapons that are hidden in some unexpected area, so you have so go looking in areas you wouldn't normally look or do things in an unusual way to get to them.

Most platform games also have some kind of level select or map screen. Although saying that I don't think Sonic had one.

Another one I remember is First Samurai on the Amiga (didn't like the second one so much), which had a lot of background animations, cool oriental/orchestral sound effects and unusual puzzles. I'm still not quite sure how they managed to get that game to have so much stuff moving on-screen without much slowdown on a plain Amiga.

Running up/down slopes is definitely a big draw, if done well, as usually people just use the `walking` or `running` sprite, as it would be used for horizontal movement, and move the sprite up or down the slope without their feet really adjusting or anything. Sonic was good with this kind of adjustement. Also if you can run upside down or apparently on any surface regardless of the angle, that's even more fun.

There aren't too many two-player or multi-player platform games, maybe that's something to consider. Traditional the player is usually totally absorbed with suceeding in their own mission with their own performance, rather than competing with a friend. Sonic had a two-player mode where you had to race to the finish, which was good fun and also featured on TV shows, although it was slightly hideous using interlaced graphics mode.

I agree that a large variety of baddies is necessary and they should animate well. Attention to detail is generally important to convey interactivity. It doesn't have to be true to physics, because the mind can `interpolate` the difference and meaning.

Typically most platformers also have end-of-level or end-of-game boss characters, usually larger and harder to beat. Sonic had some pretty good ones. The bosses in Zool were not quite so exciting. I think Sonic was a much more energetic game overall with more tension and suspense.

AngelDaniel: First Samurai was a great game but it only ran at 25FPS (PAL) or something it did feel a bit sluggish and the puzzle were damn hard!

Sonic has so many things in it, it's very good indeed.

Hello.

I think a decent platform absolutely needs a caveman with a yoyo and an easy to remember, single-syllable word that he says when dying.

If all platform games had that element they wouldn't need anything else.

Goodbye.

That GRanny in Paradise or whatever it's called platform game has very funny death phrases like "ooh there goes my hip again".

Yes. "Granny" is an excellent example how a good platformer cab be made by using only a very few simple game elements. I could not stop playing it whole night until I finally finished it the other day.

Barney