Design Query About Side Scrolling Beat Em Ups and Hack and Slash Games

[David McMurdo]

I'm currently in the early stages of developing a side scrolling hack and slash game inspired by the kind of games that I enjoyed growing up, and something occurred to me about them in thinking about how my own will work.

I'll use the classic examples of Golden Axe and Streets of Rage.

In the Mega Drive/Genesis Golden Axe trilogy, although the characters could walk in eight directions, and there were specific animations for all except up and down, they could only attack either left or right on the horizontal axis. They couldn't attack diagonally or up or down.

In Streets of Rage, although the characters could walk in eight directions, they were only animated to walk either left or right, and the game would just figure out which animation was the most appropriate to use for the direction the player wanted to walk. And again, the characters could only attack horizontally. This is true even of the recent Streets of Rage 4.

When I got thinking about all of the side scrolling games that I'd played, I couldn't think of one where a character was able to attack in any way except horizontally.

Since I'm designing my own now, I appreciate that limiting themselves in the way that those games did lessens the workload by an enormous amount, but my question is this: is there a technical reason that these games only allowed horizontal attacking?

 

[woods]

first thing that comes to mind, is when a character jumps vs when they move north.
they are moving on the Y axis but........ do you punch up or do you punch north?

//this adds complexity not only to the workload, but to overall amount of data being processed as well


look at the hardware this stuff was made on ;o)
having such a limited space to work with, you have to decide what all gets packed in there

 

[Yal]

Biggest technical reason was memory; beat-em-up sprites are HUGE (often bigger than the hardware can support, so you need to manually draw several individual sprites on top of each other) and you essentially had a choice between more animations per character... or more individual characters. Obviously the latter would feel cooler so it was usually the goto choice.

Of course, you also get 5x the workload if you want 8 directional versions of every sprite (8x if you can't just flip them horizontally because of asymmetric details) so you save a lot of time if a single version is enough.

 

[David McMurdo]

With the "up versus north" dilemma in mind, would it be possible to have characters in these games climb on ropes within that kind of 2D environment? It's kind of hard to wrap my mind around how that would work with just an X and Y axis. You see I'd like to include platforming elements too. There are many such games where characters climb ladders, but I feel that's kind of illusory, because ultimately they're just ascending the y access on a particular sprite and with a climbing animation. Could you actually make a character go above the play area? Because although I'm replicating the 2D games of the past, I'm not technically restricted to 2D. Hope that makes sense.

 

[kburkhart84]

Another thing is that it is "side" scrolling and so literally is focused on that for combat. Disregarding performance constraints, it makes things easier for the player to always have that single attack point. Having it where attacks spread in other directions makes it more resemble a top-down(or other angle) shooter. That's not a bad thing(I'm making one) if that's what you want, but it ends up being a slightly different sub-genre at that point though.

 

[woods]

adding a Z level to your game isn't that hard... may take a bit of work and a lot of fiddling with it to make things work as intended...
but isn't that how most things go? ;o)


the short short version..
adjust the hitbox/collision mask to only fire off, if it's on the appropriate Z level
we could offset the Y, maybe add shadow, //to help show height..


there is lots of ways to get that 3rd dimension working without actually using "3D"