A "Cartoony" Spatial Paradigm? pt. 7 (Platformer character analysis)

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

This post continues my exploration toward evaluating a spatial paradigm of "cartoony" digital games, which evolved through the early 1980s. Part one analyzed two important early titles, namely Cutie Q and Pac-Man. Part two looked at some Pac-Man clones and Frogger. Part three analyzed some "maze shooters" and "maze looters." Part four explores how maze games evolved into platform games. Part five examined "maze tunneler" games where the player digs their own mazes as they explore. Part six looks at games that use a mix of elevation projections.

This post analyzes the development of character designs in early platformer arcade games from 1980-1984, when "cartoony" games were particularly popular. Unlike the typical connection of platfomers with jumping, most of these games were "climbing" or "ladder" games where the player cannot jump (Space Panic, Bagman, BurgerTime, Monster Bash, Popeye, Kangaroo, Elevator Action, Mr. Do's Castle, Mappy, Mr. Do's Wild Ride). Following this is an analysis of Monster Bash, a 

Early Platformer Game Characters

Early arcade platformer game characters 1980-1984

• Space Panic - Side view. See my analysis of this game here and details on the transition from maze games to platformer games. The "Spaceman" is simply and orthographically illustrated with little more definition than a stick figure. The character is limited to a three color palette (2 bits per pixel of color data (allows for palette of 3 colors + transparency) times 256 pixels (16 rows x 16 columns) equals 512 bits or 64 8-bit bytes per frame of sprite information).
• Donkey Kong - Side view. See my analysis here. Mario is far more detailed than the Spaceman protagonist of Space Panic. Both characters are limited to a three color palette and the same sprite size, but Mario has far more detail that would be recognized as cartoon-like. Still, his projection reads as orthographic.
• Bagman - Side view. This game's character graphics are closely adapted from Donkey Kong. The legs are shaped the same as Mario's, along with the convict's sideburns and the guard's hair and hat.
• BurgerTime - Side view. See my analysis here. Peter Pepper's sprites have around 7 different colors and so probably use 3 bits per pixel for color data.
• Donkey Kong Jr. - Side view head, 3/4 view body. DK Jr.'s sprite is 32 pixels wide, twice as wide as Mario and most other sprites shown here. This allows for more horizontal character details and pixels for illustrating a 3/4 view for Junior, though it makes for an awkward platformer character shape.
• Monster Bash - Side view. See below for further analysis. 
  
• Popeye - 3/4 view. See my analysis here. It is easy to see just how huge the characters in Popeye seemed in comparison to most other arcade games of the era. Popeye is about twice as wide and four times as tall as the typical 16 x 16 pixel sprite and the Brutus sprite is even bigger. It is well-known now that Donkey Kong started out as a Popeye-licensed design, but changed before the game was completed. According to research by Kate Willaert, one reason was because it was difficult to create a recognizable Popeye illustration in a 16 x 16 image. One year later, Ikegami Tsushinki developed some innovative arcade hardware capable of displaying very large sprites for Nintendo with Popeye. 
• Kangaroo - Side view. A female protagonist, a rarity at the time. "Mama Roo" is a mother kangaroo fighting and climbing to rescue her "Baby Roo" from monkey kidnappers. The large image size and wide color palette allow for a lot of details, though Mama Roo is still illustrated only in a side view.
• Mario Bros. - Side view head, 3/4 view body. Mario grows up, with 16 x 32 (or maybe 16 x 24?) sprites and a 7 color palette (3 bits per pixel).
• Elevator Action - Side view. Agent 17 has tall 16 x 24 sprites and a 7 color palette with effective animations, though his standing image is flatly illustrated.
• Mr. Do's Castle - Side view. See my analysis here.
• Mappy - 3/4 view. Hiroshi "Mr. Dotman" Ono's pixel art skills are on display here with his illustration for the titular mouse police officer working to defeat a gang of cat thieves. Appears to be a 7 color palette.
• Arabian - Side view.
• Flicky - Side view. Small birds in the Sonic the Hedgehog series of games would take the name of "flicky" from this game.
• Bomb Jack - Side view head, 3/4 view body. The character's body is at a slight 3/4 view with two "buttons" visible on the front of his costume.
• Mr. Do's Wild Ride - Side view. Mr. Do returns in another platformer, this time with an outline drawn around his sprite.
• Pac-Land - 3/4 view. The 32 x 32 image gives Namco's artists plenty of room to add details to Pac-Man in his in a platformer. This game's character models were modified from Namco's original designs when imported to the United States to better match Hanna Barbera's Pac-Man animated TV series that debuted in 1982. The original Pac-Man design had different eyes and sported a jaunty Tyrolean hat, making him look like a Bavarian hiker. 

Aesthetically speaking, Nintendo and Namco the best-looking "cartoony" sprites of this group. In the few short years examined here, sprites became more colorful as 7-color palettes replaced earlier 3-color palettes. Larger sprites could certainly catch one's attention, but the 16 x 16 standard remained a viable character size for many games through the 1980s.

Analysis of Monster Bash

This curious 1982 platformer game from Sega has the hero climbing ladders and fighting against classic monsters from films like Dracula and Frankenstein. The game is a good example of the transitional period from maze games to platformers as the game has both platforming and maze game levels with no change in character graphics or movement.

Monster Bash intro screen

The intro screen serves as a map of the three different levels in the game. Dracula House and Frankenstein Castle are both illustrated in orthographic, elevation projection with a front view. Chameleon Man Graveyard is illustrated in oblique, plan projection in with a bird's-eye view. This makes the map look disjointed, but each projection matches the method used in each different level.

Monster Bash "Dracula House"

"Lil' Red" the hero must face off against Dracula in his house, lighting candles and touching a sword to power up a zapper weapon to defeat the vampire. Lil' Red and the bat enemies are illustrated in orthographic side and front/back views. The larger Dracula sprite is illustrated in 3/4 view. They all explore the environment illustrated in front elevation projection.

Monster Bash "Frankenstein Castle"

This level has the same visuo-spatial configuration as Dracula House, above.

Monster Bash "Chameleon Man Graveyard"

In the Chameleon Man Graveyard, gameplay shifts to that of a maze game with an overhead view, although there is no change to character graphics or movement controls. The relatively small Chameleon Man "boss" character is illustrated in the same orthographic side and front/back views as Lil' Red. The environment is completely different from the other levels, with a plan oblique projection.

This game further supports the theory that early platformer games, especially "ladder" games, evolved from and are derivations of maze games. 

Jumping Part 2: Studies of Leaps and Bounds

Continued from Jumping Part 1. 

The following is a review of selected literature about jumping in digital games.

"Moon Patrol requires players to jump their buggy over craters and other hazards." (Begy, 2010)

Jason Begy. “The History and Significance of Jumping in Games.” GAME//PLAY//SOCIETY: Contributions to Contemporary Computer Game Studies. Proceedings of the 4th annual Vienna Games Conference. Kopaed: Munich, Germany, 2010.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140207165134/http://www.jasonbegy.info:80/Begy_Jumping.pdf

Begy uses Ian Bogost's Unit Operations (2006) text as his guide and analyzes linguistic metaphors ("GOOD IS UP") for the appeal of both jumping and climbing in digital games. He also shows a relation to tabletop games where climbing up levels (snakes and ladders) and jumping over obstacles (chess knight) and "leaping captures" (checkers/draughts, alquerque, hala-tafl) are primary game mechanics.

Begy asserts that Mario's static jump in Donkey Kong, while only a defensive means of avoiding an obstacle, should be considered as an "act of dominance: once leapt over they effectively become harmless" (pg. 15). This may be true of the barrels that continue rolling down the platforms of the first stage, but fireballs may change direction and chase Mario.

The paper includes short analyses of Pitfall, Moon Patrol, Manic Miner, and Super Mario Bros. Like Swink in Game Feel, Begy ignores the arcade game Mario Bros. (1983) and confusingly refers to SMB as "Mario Bros."

Begy concludes that humans have a positive orientation metaphor with height (GOOD IS UP) that may be an embodied metaphor, something more than cultural in origin. This metaphor gives meaning to the action of jumping and may be key to the mechanic's popularity in digital games.

"Mario Jump" (Butler, 2014)

Tom Butler. "The Rise of the Jump." Polygon. 2014.

https://www.polygon.com/features/2014/1/20/5227582/the-rise-of-the-jump

Butler's history starts with the Universal arcade game Space Panic (1980), probably the first "platformer" game, though the game has no jumping. There are quotes from researchers, such as Begy, and a guide to finding examples of different aspects of jumping in games (double-jump, jump attack, triple jump, partner-assisted jump, etc.).

"Players control a rolling ball. Their task is to collect three stars." (Dahl and Kraus, 2015)

Gustav Dahl and Martin Kraus. "Measuring How Game Feel is Influenced by the Player Avatar's Acceleration and Deceleration: Using a 2D Platformer to Describe Players' Perception of Controls in Videogames." AcademicMindTrek '15: Proceedings of the 19th International Academic Mindtrek Conference. September 2015. Pages 41–46.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2818187.2818275

Dahl and Kraus were directly influenced by Swink's Game Feel (hence, the title of their paper) when they designed their experiment in changing parameters of a platformer's "game feel" and measuring player experiences. As important as this notion is to the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing a digital game, we still don't have a robust vocabulary for critiquing or analyzing game feel.

The results were somewhat inconclusive. The vocabulary the participants used to describe game feel was varied ("heavy," "slow," "realistic," etc. (pg. 15)), as I would have expected. Some users were sensitive to small changes in game feel while others didn't notice and difference. The experimenters note that "game feel" is still an odd term for users, one they compare to "mouthfeel." Users did note an inability to find the right words to describe their experience, another sign that we are lacking in language to define these aesthetics.

"Subtle implementation details found while measuring the jumps." (Fasterholdt, Pichlmair, & Holmgard, 2016)

Martin Fasterholdt, Martin Pichlmair, & Christoffer Holmgård. "You Say Jump, I Say How High?" DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG. Dundee, Scotland: Digital Games Research Association and Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games, August, 2016, Number: 1. Volume: 13. ISBN / ISNN: ISSN 2342-9666

http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/you-say-jump-i-say-how-high-operationalising-the-game-feel-of-jumping/

This thesis is a deep dive analysis of subtle details of jumps in different games. The analysis is focuses on Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Meat Boy, and Limbo, but also looks at some other games.

Fasterholdt designed his own tools for creating precise, simulated controls in a game for measurement and analysis. He used Unity to build his own replications of the games he analyzed, much like I've been doing with my own Traversing Virtual Dimensions project.

The study shows how differences in gravity, terminal velocity, friction, take off velocity, "jump release," and other parameters change how a game character feels while jumping. He also found helpful jump allowances that enable a player to jump even when the character is not on the ground. Some games use a "jump cache" (image a, above): when a player presses the jump button while in mid-air just before landing, the game will "cache" that jump command and jump as soon as the character lands. Similarly "edge jump" (what I call "coyote time") lets the player still jump after they've just stepped off the edge of a ledge.

Fasterholdt also gave a talk about his paper at Nordic Game 16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK6MNPhwndM

"Demonstration of some neat tricks to make platforming games feel better." (Strachan, 2020)

David Strachan. "Analysis of Platformers." Dave Made a Game (blog). 2020.
http://www.davetech.co.uk/gamedevplatformer

Strachan created a platformer game template in Game Maker that exemplifies some of the "subtle implementation details" that Fasterholdt identifies in his thesis. This sample template is playable on his blog page and the project is freely available on his Git Hub repository.

In addition, Strachan analyzes the jump arcs of a number of 2-D platformers, complete with time in the air, the number of frames of animation, and other information about jump parameters.