Tails Mechanics

 

As many of you already know, episode 5 is going to feature Tails as the primary character!

Here's the awesome title screen by Gwen btw, for those who maybe missed this posted in the Discord:

Today, I wanted to post about Tails' left-shift ability (e.g. special game map mechanic), which as you might guess is the ability to fly around the map, and how I am approaching it.

Like the layered map system built for episode 4's Northern Mountains maps, which allows game maps to have more depth, in order for Tails' flying ability to feel right, I am going to need to simulate depth and height of game objects. Here is more-or-less my plan to make it feel right...

Every object that we expect to be treated with height will need to have a ghost-collision game object which must define a depth value in its properties. This depth value will help us derive whether your drop shadow should be above or below an object when your player collision box is colliding with it (NOTE: your player collision box when flying is no longer the Tails sprite, it is now offset some X pixels below Tails based on your flying height. This is particularly confusing when we move your drop shadow to be above an object, because now neither your Tails sprite nor your drop shadow properly reflect where your player's collision box is located. e.g. if your flying height is 500 pixels, your collision box is always player (x, y) + (0, 500), no matter what your shadow is doing).

This trick can also support elevated platforms, like where you climb the ladder to get up the big tree at the center of Knothole.

Platforms purely in the sky, like the one Bunnie can hookshot to from the second level of the tree, can also use this feature. So this should cover all of our potential use cases.

The generalizable use case is to just create a ghost collision game object from the top edge of a walkable platform to the ground, and then define the "depth" value on that object to be the number of vertical tiles that make up that platform's walkable space * tile height (32).

When it comes time for Tails to try to land somewhere, we will then take advantage of the layered map system so that when you land "on top" of a knothole hut or knothole war base thing, you are now in a higher map layer, and the space above the hut or base has collision boundaries around the walkable area, as you'd expect. Also, obviously when you are flying around, you are also in a higher map layer, which is why you are not colliding with things you were previously colliding with when you were walking.

Anyways, it's a bit more annoying to get right than it might seem. Will post a video at some point once I feel like I have got it, because I just feel like this is such a cool feature.