programnoir

[programnoir]

Platformer Mechanics: What is Coyote Space?

While Combat Nightsuit Saboteur is going to be a simple game in terms of game mechanics as a platformer, there's one mechanic that I personally feel is essential to platformers besides jumping, and that's coyote space.

The term coyote space comes from the cartoon Wile E. Coyote and the amusing gag where he will walk off of the edge of a cliff for a few steps before it's too late for him to recover. In gameplay terms, players who walk off of an edge (or run, slip, etc) will have a limited amount of time or frames where they can still jump.

You may be asking, "is coyote space that necessary to implement?" In my expert opinion, yes, absolutely.

Take an innocuous section of your typical platformer game, such as the below screenshot:

When platformers do not implement coyote space, I feel that their gameplay becomes inherently too strict, due to how human it is for your timing to be a few fractions early or late. Coyote space is crucial because we are not calculators that know the precise instant that our next pixel will be the last chance to jump.

Because of this lack of insight and our natural margin of error, the scenarios in the above screenshot show where issues in a platformer without coyote space will be exacerbated. Platforms with a very small amount of horizontal space (like the platforms on the left) and areas with an overhang matching your floor's width (the platforms on the right) are guaranteed to produce a degree of frustration. Either you slip off because you jumped too late, or you hit your head on the ceiling due to jumping too early.

Coyote space solves both of these problems. The video below demonstrates a before-and-after with an exaggerated coyote space window of 0.5 seconds to show the effect.

Coyote space is one of the many small things that makes game development take longer to polish and perfect, but it's worth it to preserve a satisfying player experience.

[programnoir]

Talking about Stardust West

Stardust West is the name of a third-person space combat game that I'm tinkering with. I've heard this compared to Star Fox games, but I actually take a lot more inspiration from an old MMO that went by Space Cowboy Online.

I'm currently undecided on how the game looks and feels to play (and this video is using a lot of placeholders), so you can expect a lot to change.

[programnoir]

Talking about Combat Nightsuit Saboteur

Combat Nightsuit Saboteur is our main collaborative project, at the moment. This is going to be a simple platformer shooter with a small handful of levels.

There's inspiration here from anime, PC-98 games, id software platformers, etc. I essentially want to flex my pixel art skills and mix dazzling spectacle segments with straightforward platformer segments.

At the moment, the visual style is pretty well defined - we're just exploring level design and improving game mechanics.

[programnoir]

Introducing Ourselves!

Hi! We're two game developers, and we want to make and talk about games both on this blog and on cohost!

I'm Tony (he/him, but you can also call me Toni and use she/her). I'm the main developer that plans, designs, programs, and creates assets for Program://Noir games.

The other half of the team is Clementine (she/her). She is a specialist in music production and just as much if not more of a treasure trove of video game knowledge.

I'll talk about the projects that I'm making, soon. If you want to get a head start, I have a few posts on the cohost blog that you can take a look at.