Mudtato
What’s the story?
I don’t want to go down the path of being “realistic” when designing a platformer. The gameplay for a platformer is inherently unrealistic. However, I find it hard to design something that’s incoherent or doesn’t tie into a logical narrative.
Take Mario for example. Why on earth would plumbers be jumping around on platforms, mushrooms and turtles and collecting coins? It’s just nonsense. It worked, though.
While I don’t think narrative is really important for a platformer to be great, I want to have a consistent theme in order to design environments, enemies, sounds etc that fit together.
How do you explain every creature and object in an environment being hazardous to the player in a platformer? It’s generally something that players just accept, but I’d like it to make sense within the world I’m creating.
Here’s what I have in mind…
At some point in our future a spaceship is sent off from Earth. It ends up far, far, far from where it was supposed to be going, and from where it will ever be found or be able to return from. It crash lands onto an alien world. A handful of survivors awake from stasis and manage to establish themselves on the planet. Over many, many years the humans end up covering the planet, with their origins being lost to time. Through the usual conflicts, exploitation of the environment etc the humans eventually destroy themselves/each other and the planet once again becomes uninhabited. The native flora and fauna, however, had slowly over time been evolving to defend the planet from the issues the people left behind any future “aliens” that might visit.
After some thousands or tens of thousands of years, through some geological upheaval, the wreckage of the originally crashed ship is unearthed and our protagonist is released from stasis. The protagonist (and player) initially have no idea about any of the events that have transpired and for all they know they’ve landed on an alien world with a seemingly long extinct humanoid alien race and hostile alien life. Not to mention hazards in the way of technology that remains from some ancient wars.
The player will set out to find other survivors from the crash and a way to call for help, gradually uncovering the story over the course of the game. Maybe in the end some future post-human species can turn up, or maybe the planet is irreversibly damaged and the player is the last survivor as the world collapses around them.
I think the mechanics of a platformer can work well within this narrative, so I’ll start with it and see where it goes.
In some ways the story is reminiscent of the original Planet of the Apes, which I love, but I’ve got some different ideas for it and there will be zero apes. Ok, maybe one ape.
Oh and another great platformer I missed in my last entry was Yoshi’s Island.