The 2D Platformer Brainworms Will Eventually Take Hold
You'd think it funny that someone who, growing up, wasn't allowed to have any kind of games console or access to a computer that could run games and was regularly told that "video games rot your brains" would end up working in games as soon as she was physically able to, but here I am!
Even if I lived under a rock in terms of game exposure, I was fortunate enough to have a computer that could run flash games, and they're still some of my biggest artistic influences for my own games. I was allowed 30 minutes of "game time" out of the 1 hour of computer time I was allowed per day, and those 30 minutes were spent searing themselves into my brain and creatively inspiring it for decades. Which maybe is a kind of rot but who can say. I get paid for it now, so at least my mom's not complaining.
In fact, the charred forest at the beginning of Bionicle's Mata Nui Online Game directly inspired me to make Arboreal Allure back in 2020, and it's so clearly visible:
Besides MNOG, I've had several small side projects inspired by feelings and mechanics I'd get playing other LEGO/Bionicle flash games. Especially platformers and side-scrollers. Games like Final Ninja, Fancy Pants Adventure 2, and several other Bionicle Flash Games had really big impacts on me.
AND YET!!
I've never once made a game about platforming or side scrolling.
Which maybe doesn't sound like the biggest crime to anyone else, but it does to me! Sebastian Lague's 2D Platformer Controller series is what got me started making games in Unity 9 years ago (ouagh) and since then I've made more platforming character controllers than I can count! But I have still never taken one far enough to build a whole game around this kind of movement and perspective.
There's so much I really love about platformer character controllers! Implementing coyote time, jump buffering, variable jump height, fast falling, and fine-tuned jump arcs are all such fun problems to tackle in order to make a platformer controller feel really good, and The Itch to execute on these follows me to every project I work on.
Hell, Cast Fortune is a fishing game I made in 2022 where you're really only pressing 1 button to fish and talk. But since I decided the that perspective would take the form of a 2D side-scroller, I got to indulge and added jump buffering and coyote time. The fact that I haven't made and released a platformer or any kind of movement-focused side-scroller has been bugging me for years.
ANYWAYS. I'm writing this post because recently Hollow Knight: Silksong was released and it's so satisfying and fun to see all my friends enjoying and playing a game with such a big focus on 2D movement like this. I've never played Hollow Knight and it'll be 1000 years before I get through my backlog of 10 games to play Silksong, but in the meantime it's doing a great job of making me feel extremely antsy to scratch this itch out of my brain once and for all.
I have no particular movement mechanics I want to explore. I have no particular mechanics at ALL I want to explore with it, but the desire to make a little guy run around on the screen and explore an area is STRONG. I think about the games I have played and really enjoyed in recent years like Elephantasy, Dog World, Dead Cells, and Metroid Dread, and I'm like damn. I NEED to make something like that!!
It will happen eventually! It feels like an inevitability. I guess I'll just let it percolate through my brain and eventually something really fucking weird will catch my interest and pull me in for 8-9 months straight and let me create something that would make 9yo Noé lose her shit.
