Making it in Unreal: Billie Bust Up and the elusive ‘feel’ of 3D platforming

Banjo-Kazooie. Ratchet & Clank. Jak and Daxter. Yooka-Laylee. You can learn a lot about 3D platformers by looking at the symbiotic beings at their head. In each of these games, the intertwining of two characters is made to look not like a ragdoll disaster but the most natural thing in the world. The gold standard for the genre is to make the complex look effortless - a hugely intimidating prospect for any industry newcomers hoping to imitate their favourites. That hasn’t put off the team behind Billie Bust Up, who moved on from the Unreal Development Kit they used as students to Unreal Engine 4, the same tool used by many of their big-budget peers. Since then, they’ve applied the lessons of the programmers and animators who came before them in pursuit of that tricky end goal - the sense of freedom that defines the 3D platformer. There are genres in which you can forgive a certain clunkiness. In the decade after 3D became the standard, RPG fans came to accept that real-time combat was not the forte of their favoured field. But in the 3D platformer, there’s no room for that kind of forgiveness - the game lives or dies based entirely on how good it feels. Mario 64 is about the joy of movement, and if Mario himself was no joy to control it’d be about nothing at all.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2Pyi5nj