AGI Studio 1: Research

This Week I played Blu Escape and Bomb Chicken, both critically admired platformer games and watched some Video Essays about why their mechanics are praised. 

Bomb Chicken is a 2018 game by Nitrome. It features a chicken moving left to right through a factory filled with platforms, built on an burial ground for anicient and mysterious chickens. There are minimal mechanics, which are simple to memorize, accessible to mobile and broadly implementable. The chicken character can not jump, duck or hit, instead she moves left and right and lays towers of bombs that let the player climb, attack push buttons, move blocks, etc, while also damaging the player if you stay too close to them. The gameplay was fluid and weighted in a very satisfying way. The animations of the character matched that weighting and kept the tone light and silly even when its content (a chicken murdering factory) became dark. It and Blu Escape both reminded me of Sean Velasco's Shovel Knight, especially in their light bouncy character movements. Each revives classic platformer atmospheres and puzzle mechanics to evoke nostalgia and beyond that to continue building onto a genre that has more capability for evolution. The game made me reflect on how I plan to implement platform layouts and exploration in my own game and how my core mechanics, at this point just swimming and gathering fish, can be used for other purposes, Turning my idea of controls from a broad list of capabilities into a discsaplined short list of effective player tools. 
 

Blu Escape is a 2020 platformer by ANATA. It features a knight character travelling through a castle, slowly moving both left, right and upwards. There are no attacks, nor enemies, simply stationary spikes, razors and pools of lava to manoeuvre around. It is contructed around a set of quick, difficult and deadly puzzles with occasional checkpoints, relying on the players willingness to die repeatedly in an effort to time the jumps perfectly. Between almost every tiny jump puzzle there is space to stand and consider your next move as a player, mentally planning out your jump timing. Without a broad amount of game knowledge, I struggle to think of contemporary similaries, but in my opinion, Blu Escape is similar to classic Mario bowsers castle levels, in that both patience and quick acting are rewarded on and off throughout to make the player consider their approach between actions. Blue Escape made me consider timing puzzles as a mechanic and how that will impact the shape of my characters hit box, especially as my character will be more fluid in form than that of Blu Escape or Bomb Chicken. At this stage in my understanding of AI developement, I'll likely be relying on stable avoidable enemies and studying Blu Escapes play style, being an ideal refined example of that mechanic in use, will effect my games outcome. 
 

Both files cant fit on this page and the page cant store two links. But my playthrough clips are: 

https://youtu.be/OX5HzTzZHIg

and

https://youtu.be/r8dExqdxf-0