teaching basic climbing skills

the player (nova :3) has a few Very Important Skills

• walking
• jumping
• climbing
• dashing

walking is intuitive enough to learn. so is jumping. dashing is similarly pretty intuitive. what about climbing?

apparently everyone who playtests this fucking game end up getting stuck somewhere near the beginning because they don’t know how to climb. why?

there are multiple pieces to this problem. first is that the actual mechanic in the game is a little strange. I’ll why explain in a minute. first let’s look at other games that inspired nullstars to see how they deal with climbing!

• mario maker 2

mario maker doesn’t have climbing, but it does have wall sliding and wall jumping in the nsmbu game mode. this is done by moving onto a wall while falling. wall jumping doesn’t allow you to gain any height with the same wall this way. mm2-nsmbu levels often expect you to already know this. I know that at the very least, nsmbwii doesn’t even require it at any point, but it is used to gain a star coin or two. it is taught in a bonus room via level design.

having this ability is exactly what led me to make ejow in the first place, and was the first thing I implemented in ejow after jumping. climbing happened because in that prototype, sometimes when jumping over a wall, you just barely miss and hit the wall, sliding down instead. I made it so that you didn’t slide, and instead could climb by jumping (like several of scratch platformers would do). pressing up then down to actually climb came last.

speaking of …

• ejow

remember that nullstars at the very start was redemption arc of sorts for ejow because I had left over angst from how much I disliked the game.

so to summarize, ejow’s climbing is down by just pushing against a wall while falling to grip onto it, then pressing up or down to climb. you can also jump while gripping to acsend. this isn’t taught in the game. I find this very funny.

• celeste

celeste has both options. there is a dedicated climb button. moving onto a wall will let you slide on it for a tiny bit, and you can jump away from the wall like in nsmbu. pressing climb will cause you to grip onto a wall if you are touching it and falling, and from there you can press up or down to climb, or jump to jump straight up. there is also a stamina system, where any action involving climbing will tick down your invisible stamina meter. running out of stamina disables climbing until you can recover stamina, which is done by doing basically anything that recovers your dash. the climb button is taught in a tutorial, and the nitty gritty of how everything else works is taught via brute force level design.

• micro platformer

fuck you

in this one, you can grip onto a wall by moving into one while falling (and continuously pushing against it). you can then jump to bounce away from the wall for a few frames before control is regained. this is taught with a tutorial.

the main similarity between all of these, and why they all work, is that their wall mechanics are all treated as seperate states. they change the way you work with the player slightly, they are a discrete mode of transport to jumping. this is how most platformers do it apparently, and so this style of wall mechanic is the intuitive one.

nullstars used to do what ejow did, but I ended up removing the climbing state because I wanted the game to have a lot of falling and tighter spaces than ejow, and automatically gripping the walls would have gotten in the way of that. I figured that I wasn’t losing terribly much. you could still “climb” by jumping up walls (like as if celeste’s climb button was always pressed). eventually I added a grip state to make it more intuitive. instead of gripping on a wall when you are moving onto it and falling, now, you have to have jumped up the wall once to grip onto it. this is how it works in the game still. I think these controls work perfectly for nullstars, and the kind of platforming I’m going to have eventually. the problem is that most people seem to expect that the act of “climbing” as a different state, so when nova doesn’t seem to have an obvious way of climbing walls, climbing must not be an option.

in nullstars, for aesthetic reasons, any kind of cutscene or text explaining how a mechanic works isn’t an option. this means that climbing must be taught via level design, which is exactly what I tried.

the point

the first room is where I wanted those mechanics to be learned. these are the main points of interest:

the intention of this was that the player has to learn how to jump, and will probably learn about how jumping has variable heights here. they may also get stuck between the two pillars and do a tiny jump up the second pillar, gripping onto the wall. that pit is meant to do two things: show that you can’t die by falling offscreen (accidentally falling in it won’t kill you, and continuing forward will pan the camera down to show that the pit simply exists), and if one does fall in it, force them to climb out.

the idea here is was that someone would go here, be like “i can’t get passed here normally”, attempt to get passed, then learn how to climb.

what I learned from playtesting is that the first example here does teach most that you won’t die by falling off, but no one ever falls into the pit. the second example? most people just jump over it. lol. they never learn that climbing really exists, then they move on until they inevitably get stuck.

at which point I ask, how. like. agh.

tldr

before I was being told that “climbing was unintuitive”, but it wasn’t until I actually went in and investigated why that I figured out the problem. people weren’t being forced to learn the mechanics. I decided to make that second wall much taller, to force someone to size up the situation and decide that there’s no other way around the wall than to jump over it. I also added a little platform to imply that you have to stand on it.

testing!! testing is really important apparently!!

anyways. yeag :3