Using this platform to talk, well, platforms
This is what 'coyote time' looked like in 1989.
For the uninitiated, and I do hope my posts here aren't simply playing a show to an audience of gamedevs only, 'coyote time' is a term meaning the ability to jump a platform game character after they've ostensibly left their stable footing in a ledge or platform. It is derived from the scant few seconds of solidity Wile E. Coyote feels beneath his feet in the Road Runner cartoons, after he has actually careened off a cliff face.
It's actually long-bothered me that amateur game developers will often repeat verbatim the 'advice' that a platform game can't possibly have good 'game-feel' without the mechanic; to which I have always disagreed, as a part of who I have learned to be is that I will question absolutely anything presented to me as an indomitable truth. After all, before semi-modern times, we all enjoyed platform games that let you fall off ledges as soon as your feet left them, right?
However, I've come to realise that 'coyote time' isn't a new concept. I will repeat that, not a new concept; regardless of the late-jumping implementation of modern platform games.
Y'see, older games used to have these chunky and large hitboxes for the player, which often conformed to the visible height and width of the character sprite. In visual terms, this did indeed mean that a character could indeed be half-off a platform and yet still standing on it, as the collision box still had a corner on solid ground; leaving a character humourously balancing on a single foot, as seen above in 1989's The Super Shinobi.
I see modern implementations of CT therefore as something of a hotfix for smaller player hitboxes being the trend, and the norm. For although these smaller player hitboxes make dodging hazards and other dangers easier, their dissonance with visible sprite dimensions can often make judging jumps a much-fuzzier affair. And some leniency in the jump timing is a band-aid over that.
Which isn't wrong, I don't think coyote time is a bad mechanic (I've used it in my previous two platform games Quickly, Quackley! and NekoNecro) but I don't think it should be a mandatory one either. I have no concluding thoughts to this ramble, it's just the kind of thing I like to think about as a game developer; as I say, questioning anything held up as an incontestable fact. Because often, these things actually aren't.
(Crossposted from my Cohost)
