You remind me a lot of my past self. So; in japan they have a position called a “loud American”, in which someone has the sole job of being in meetings and telling the manager off when they’re doing some stupid stuff that will negatively impact the business. I will, for this one message and this one only, fulfill this role for you, and if you do not take a liking my advice I will leave it there and bother you with it no further, however I would deeply encourage you to listen to what I am about to say.
I understand that your work here is in the attempt to create a game that is notably “hard”, and I am not under any illusion otherwise. and I deeply appreciate your sense of commitment to such an ideal- it’s rare to see someone with such a desire to create a game like this, and I will blow no smoke up your ass regarding that. However.
There is a very distinct line between “absolutely no quality of life features” and “hard game”. The path of pain in hollow knight is hard. But it’s full of quality of life features. Benches, infinite SOUL totems, extremely abundant and forgiving return points if you fall on the spikes- throughout the entire place, the only time I had felt like I’d been cheated was during a segment with a split-second timing window to fall through multiple holes in a row without being impaled by retracting spikes that didn’t have any return points between any of them. Hollow Knight’s Path of Pain is a remarkably well done challenge, but it isn’t frustrating. You know when you mess up, and it’s entirely your fault when you get sent back somewhere, all the mechanics used are cleanly implemented and 100% within your control. Hollow knight features elements like fox time and double jumps, and it’s sequel is one of the most looked forward to games of all time despite it’s seven long years in development. To say that hollow knight’s success, despite being a hard game, is in great part to the cleanness and gravity of the player’s actions making sure that the player NEVER feels as though they are cheated out of a victory due to how incredibly satisfying it is to control The Knight would be a significant understatement. Let’s take a look at another game.
Celeste, a game I would like to personally give the crown of “most difficult platformer of all time”, specifically in later B-sides and (I would assume the entirety of) C-sides, is an incredibly difficult platformer. It, once again, features foxtime, and double-jumps (in the form of Madeline’s Dash ability) as well as many other incredibly well-designed features that fit like a glove and I have never had an issue with using (except for the clouds, which, I got used to after a certain amount of time) alongside many of my friends who are super-fans of the game that have 100% completed it and swear by the game’s incredible nature for being a feat in both difficulty and fairness; and once again is an incredibly well-made game held in the highest of honor and praise amongst it’s fans.
These games I both brought up to highlight that- The double jump is a gold-standard for a very good reason. That is because it is incredibly Clean and doesn’t warrant programming your brain for a new mechanic with 17 different nuances to keep track of, excluding the player’s timing and positioning, and in some cases, velocity, it works off of your already established idea of “jumping” to get the job done. Additionally, to highlight that cleanness and quality of life features are not enemies of difficulty. I will now provide that rant I mentioned earlier:
If you continue with this mechanic without any form of quality of life feature instead of implementing a proper double-jump, you will run into a very large problem: People will not want to use it. And any content you put behind it will be seen as optional, and if it so happens to not be the case, and a main story area is locked behind this mechanic, the chances are that you’re going to alienate every player who has difficulty using that mechanic, Especially considering that you don’t have save points while in the dungeon, and death means having to do every parkour challenge again to get back to where you were.
A good game that is forced to use this mechanic would use it only for optional side content, if it is absolutely required. Using this mechanic in any other way than optional side-content for players looking for the extra challenge would cross that line, and this game will alienate every single player that dares to pick it up and doesn’t immediately fall in love with how the charge bubble works. Additionally, foxtime is a developer oversight patch that fixes a lot of problems, such as not being able to jump off of sloped surfaces while moving, because you’re constantly moving one pixel downwards every pixel right/left you move, it’s genuinely not something added to make bad players better; it’s something to make it so that good players that miss the proper timing by a fraction of a second one time aren’t shunt into the bottomless pit of fuck you go back to the start of the dungeon. Foxtime and double-jumps are both widely used and widely accepted because of how incredibly well-rounded they are as mechanics, not just because they’re easy to implement.
Besides, i’m not even asking for it for free- You could put as many stipulations on it as you want; I’m easily thinking it would be an option you’d have to enable that only works if you have the charge beam active, charged, and haven’t used it since touching the ground last, at which point you’d simply have the ability to jump again while in the air, and it’d consume your charge instantly. There are ways to make this work, even if what you want players to do is to use the charge bubble. Hell, it could be it’s own special upgrade that requires that you do some bullshit with the charge bubble to get it to prove that the player using it knows how to do the charge bubble jump first. Game design is art, and as such there’s a thousand different ways to carve this turkey.
Ultimately, I am not asking you to forsake your vision, or your work to make the game more accessible, I simply am asking for a way to achieve this double-jump without abusing glitches or having to break my brain over the course of more than an hour for a platforming challenge that I will undoubtedly have to do many times if it is ever used in a frequently trafficed area, or that it’s use should be relegated to exclusively difficult side-challenges that offer the player nothing than maybe extra score/maybe a secret ending if you get all of the burgers in the game.
