whipseey

A lovely setting, charming character, platforming action in pixel art, and above all, a "whip/ninja rope" mechanics I'm in love with since Fury of the Furries and Mickey Magical Quest. You bet I'm following @whipseey in his quest recovering the Lost Atlas ^_^. And the fact it is drawing inspiration from the legendary Mr. Gimmick is just the perfect spice to complete the gift.

Yet, while watching I realised that one of the sceneries had an issue that also existed in Bilou School Rush and that was pointed out by Kirby Kid when he gave feedback on the early version of the game: one-block-wide pillars.

You have a lot of "one block wide" or "character width wide" platforms. I find this irritating. They put a lot of stress on the mechanics and they also slow down the gameplay a lot. Open the platform spaces up some more.

 For the untrained player, these will put strong stress on the player's knowledge of the game engine's intimacy, like how much exactly gravity and momentum there is, so that one can land her favourite pink avatar on such a tiny spot.

One think I like to do on Twitter is to dream how I'd approach those short video  sequences myself. Preferably in the original character's abilities set, a bit like how Myamoto and his team decided to make Popeye be able to jump over barrels in the early prototypes of Donkey Kong as it was the most natural thing to do if it wasn't a videogame.

And what would be the most natural thing to do if you barely missed a jump to a pillar while carrying a magical yoyo/whip/rope thing ? Well I bet I'd try to wrap the rope around the pillar to be safe again.

That in turn raised the question of "how would I do such a thing for Bilou in my own engine?"  Should the 'whip' be an extension of the player's gob (that is, the internal software element ruling the sprite's behaviour) or be a gob of its own ? Should the pillar be made of special tiles or would the whip-end object (if any) be able to detect a pattern of solid-but-small-enough area ? Both approaches would be valid in each question, but as you may have guessed from the way I ask (or read in the sketches), I'd rather opt for the second answers if I was immediately ready to introduce that ;-)