[ Closed ] Regarding the double jump

I've read a bit and heard that people are very skeptical about this. I will rant about my thoughts about it, how we came to the conclusion and some other issues surrounding it. This is very long but a jolly good read and insight into the design of Teewars.

Teewars has been a R&D project for quite a few years. This year we released the very first version of it. The second major update came and a lot was changed. The third major installment is on it's way and brings a lot of new things and changes some old stuff.

The Vision
Me and Teetow has a pretty good vision of what Teewars should be, a vision that the community can't see. One great example of this are the new skins. People feel that they don't fit Teewars, but it does. It doesn't fit their perception of what Teewars is, but it's something that we always wanted to have in Teewars and something that has always been in our vision of Teewars.

The Experiments
In the really really really early days of Teewars we did a lot of experimenting (like 4-5 years ago). The first version didn't have the hook. It had a jet-pack instead. We later on tried a lot of things with having a hook instead. The hook was way more fun. In an other version we tried leaving the hook out of the game for awhile and experimented with double-jump and wall jumps to move around. It was a bit hard to move around using only this. When writing the base the new version, the version that became 0.1.0, we considered everything again.

The Familiar
Quake 1 was a really good multi-player game, Quake 3 as well. Unreal Tournament is sweet, ut2003/2004 as well. But within there lies the problem. People tend to like things that are familiar to them. This is something that can cause a lot of problems when you do a game iterative. People get used to how it feels and thinks that it should be that way. They then get get scared of new stuff that forces them to change their now very well known patterns. I don't say that every new change is a good one but even good changes will meet this resistance.

The Teewars Design Plan
The design for Teewars and it's code follows a very very strict code. It's best summed up as KISS or Occam's Razor.
1. Teewars should be fun!
2. Teewars should contain no excess and be kept to the bare minimum, only exception is rule 1.
3. Teewars should be deterministic and predictable. No random variables, no exceptions.
4. Teewars should be about order, not chaos.
5. Teewars should be very informative on what's happening.
Following these rules we believe that you can create a very fun and skill-based game.

The Motivation and Reasons
Motivating wall-jumps is hard. There is a wall, use the hook, escape. If you have double jump, wall-jump becomes an excess. Motivation for having double jump in Teewars are much easier and have very good reasons. One things that many people have complained about that its so much hooking all the time, we agree to some part. Another is that it makes you able to maneuver better in the air and recover from failed jumps.
But there is two big reasons for adding it. First of all, it feels very very natural. Took about 5-10 minutes of playing around to get used to it and all the cool maneuvers you can do with it. A lot of other great 2D games has this. The second reason is CTF. When you are chased with the flag, you want to shoot behind you but then you loose the ability to use the hook to get around. Double jump makes it, I wouldn't say possible but more possible to move around on a map getting chased.

Conclusion
So, in 0.3.0 a lot is going to change. Me and Teetow argued about wall-jumps and double jumps for about 1.5 month before settling on having double jumps and not wall-jumps. Every aspect has been argued 5 times and considered about 10 times before I wrote the final code for it. Next version might feel a bit alien in the beginning, because of air jump, prediction and minor physics tweaks, but in the end I think we have done the right choices to make Teewars a really great game.