One of the best things about the art of video games is that people can create concrete responses from their reactions to other people’s work relatively quickly and effectively. When combined with the fact that people will always have wildly different perspectives on things, this allows an insanely varied body of conflicting video game concepts to exist co-dependently.
One example of this strange set of affairs was the proliferation of ‘Jump Maps’ during the height of Counter-Strike‘s popularity. Jump maps required players to reach a destination in a Counter-Strike map by doing nothing other than jumping on platforms. The skill required in playing the game in such a way involved understanding the limits of the player’s hit-box in reaching progressively smaller and more awkwardly-placed platforms. Needless to say this completely goes against anything Counter-Strike (or, perhaps, Half-Life, even though it did feature some kind of platforming) was originally intended to do as a game. The complete exclusion of using fire-arms in a jump map’s gameplay was a result of interpreting the mechanics of the Half-Life engine from a radically different perspective. The same also goes for ‘Surf Maps’, which completely altered the conceptual operation of the Half-Life engine yet again.
This practice of reinterpreting the set of possible experiences that a first-person shooter can convey to a player has the potential to continue with Hitbox Team’s new game, Spire. Hitbox Team recently developed the highly successful 2D platformer Dustforce. Making a subtle jibe at the Mario schtick associated with the genre, Dustforce is about a set of janitors who must platform their way through levels to achieve a variety of both time-tested and wholly-innovative objectives. One of the unique concepts employed in Dustforce‘s intelligent execution of one of gaming’s oldest formulas is the requirement to touch every surface of a level–brush it free of ‘dust’. The game plays in much the same way as the freeware title N, but its legacy to the gaming ancestry of platforming is so well-executed in substantive terms that it stands as nothing but a triumph of ‘good game design’.
Spire, on the other hand, is a first-person shooter about (you guessed it) reaching the top of a small tower by platforming. The game is inspired by similar concepts to those employed in Counter-Strike jump maps:
On (sic) Spire, one of our goals since the beginning has been to create an FPS movement system that feels snappy like Dustforce, incorporating walljumps, wall sliding, and other advanced techniques.
The developers heap praise on the Challenge ProMode Arena mod of Quake 3 as an inspiration for the goals they hope to achieve with Spire. Quake 3 CPMA, amongst other changes to the dynamics of the original game, tinkers with Q3‘s movement mechanics, allowing different jumping techniques and the ability to control the player’s movement mid-air. It makes the game feel graceful and fluid by transcending the corridor-shooter aspect of the game and opening up the game environment for new kinds of player interaction:
For more information, read the whole article about Spire on the Hitbox Team’s website. I also strongly encourage the reader to aggregate their site’s blog posts with their RSS feed link.