Your platformer game can engage players 100x better if you create a world they want to explore.

Finding it difficult to design an interesting world to get your players engaged for hours on your platformer game? By the end of this post, I'll share 5 features you can add to your game TODAY to make it more interesting.

Why Interactive Objects Matter

Every modern game has one thing in common: interactive objects in the game world. A game world should invite players for exploration, and to explore, players must engage and interact with objects from this world.

Successful games always provide that in some shape: NPCs, collectibles, doors, levers, buttons, switches. For instance, Hollow Knight has all of these, and more.

So if you want to bring life to your game world, you need to enrich it with these mechanics so instead of telling or showing, players play the game to understand it.

Every game has a narrative, and as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman explain in their book Rules of Play:

"Everything in a game is potentially a kind of narrative descriptor. Thinking in terms of narrative descriptors means framing the elements inside and outside of a game as objects that communicate the story. As players, we rely on narrative description to help us make sense of the settings, events, and characters encountered.

— Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman

Feature #1 - Inspectable Objects

Skip to 3:21 to watch the player inspect an artifact

In Hollow Knight, after introducing players to movement and combat mechanics, the developers immediately introduce an artifact for players to inspect which will prompt the dialogue system with some text to provide context about the game world.

This is an excellent way to tell the background story about the game's world building. Players understand that they can find objects with meaningful information that will help them navigate the story and figure out what's going on.

Depending on your approach to story telling, you can use the character's voice to present an inner dialogue with insights about the object or how it fits with other information he/she already knows about this world.

Feature #2 - Non-playable Characters (NPCs)

Characters bring life to games. They communicate that there are living beings in that world with a culture and you can use them to understand what's going on.

Even in games with a focus on action gameplay elements, adding a little bit of adventure through the use of a dialogue can be very useful mechanism to allow players to gather context about the game's background story and world's settings. For instance, after introducing the background story with a cutscene, creators of Cuphead make the players engage in a dialogue with the Elder Kettle, even before teaching anything regarding the game's core mechanics.

Video 2 - Skip to 1:57 to watch Cuphead first dialogue with Elder Kettle

NPCs can be used for all sorts of interactions from dialogues to accessing menus. For example, in games where living beings are not important, such as space shooters, players can access some menus directly from an user interface: shop, upgrades, skill trees, perks. But in games where culture (thus living beings) are relevant, accessing these menus is intermediated by interactions with said living beings: a shopkeeper, an innkeeper, a skillmaster.

Feature #3 - Levers

A living world reacts to players' actions creating dynamic situations providing meaningful impact to players' actions within the game. For example, you probably already went through a situation where you thought you could interact with a lever and you couldn't. So why add such a thing in the game? JUST TO MAKE YOU SUFFER?

Don't do that to your players. Whenever you want players to perform an action with immediate impact in the game world, especially in its structures such as bridges, elevators, and gates, you can use a lever that will sync its state with the state of said structure: raised or lowered, downwards or upwards, opened or closed.

For example, in Ori and the Blind Forest, players use levers to perform changes to the game environment allowing them to maneuver through obstacles. In the following segment, players pull a lever to lower a platform that can be used to perform a "wall jump", an ability they just unlocked, and reach the other side of a cliff to progress to the next challenge in the game.

Video 3 - Skip to 20:21 to watch the player pulling a lever

Notice that these mechanisms should immediately show the impact of players actions in the game world. It's different from something like a moral system that usually show the impact of players actions as long term events.

Feature #4 - Collectibles

One of the main techniques to motivate players to explore your game is to give them something that will trigger the completion of a collection. You can distribute these collectibles in hidden areas or gate them behind quests or other tasks.

Collectibles can be used as breadcrumbs to lead players into finding the trails you left behind when designing the game experience. I always like to use the classic games for this example. Breadcrumbing is a level design technique that we use to guide players through the game's designed experience.

Video 4 - Skip to 0:09 to watch the player collecting bananas used to breadcrumb them

In Donkey Kong Country's Mine Cart Carnage level, the designers used bananas to guide players through learning what they could do with the mine cart and how this level was supposed to be played. Notice how they start with a straight line to get a feel of the cart speed, then a parabola to teach you can jump and the cart's jump height, then they use the bananas to lure players to the right rails, and then they play with this guidance to test players critical thinking, using a single banana close to holes that, if players try to catch, they are very likely to fall and lose a life. Genius design!

Feature #5 - Portals

Making a game world involves adding depth to it: hidden areas, layered zones, and even zoomed out views. A rich world has rich locations, and rich locations have depth. Breaking down a zone into multiple areas and interconnecting them is how we create maps and locations that can expand and provide meaningful exploration for players. For instance, imagine if Super Mario World was a single continuous area instead of 96 self contained areas that you can enter and leave. It would be a lot of cognitive load for the player to make sense of it and progress through it, even with checkpoints along the way. Portals serve as a connection between these discrete areas and it can be used as a level selection mechanism or within a zone as an exploration mechanism. For instance, in Cuphead, you can walk around in world map view and when you interact with a Portal, you will change the game context to either a boss fight or a run 'n' gun stage. Regardless of the type, you use a portal for that, connecting the abstract world exploration to a concrete "location" in that world.

Video 5 - Skip to 6:33 to watch the player selecting a run’n’gun level from the world map view

But also, portals can be used to connect areas within the same contextual level. For instance, in Flinthook, a level is a series of small areas connected by portals. This is typical in games with procedurally generated levels, like Binding of Isaac as well.

Video 6 - Skip to 1:58 to watch the player transitioning between areas in a level

This is an ingenious design decision because it allows us to create worlds that expand according to our resources, adapting the project scope to the amount of time and money available to invest in more content.

Implementation Made Easy

These features are guaranteed to enrich your game world and they are easy to implement. The final 3 chapters in the Platformer Essentials Cookbook teach you how to create interactive areas to trigger said interactions, how to create switches to allow players to toggle the state of an object, and how to create portals to connect zones, locations, areas, and places within your game.

The Interactive Area chapter is already available in the new HTML book format, check out the devlog update for more information.

Get Started Today!

Get the Godot Platformer Essentials cookbook today and implement these and other 16 features fundamental for great platformer games and join 534 indie game developers who are already making great platformer games with Godot.

Figure 1 - Godot Platformer Essentials cookbook ratings

Get the Godot Platformer Essentials cookbook

And if you want to enrich your world even more, after implementing NPCs you can trigger a dialogue using the Dialogue System from the Godot Adventure Essentials. This way, you will be able to tell amazing stories in your games.

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