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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

Even in film the convention is that if you're character is going back, standing in the way of another character moving the plot forward, or just feeling weak or uncertain, they should face the left. When was the last platformer you saw where you moved left to progress? The right hand side conventionally portrays certainty, strength, and progress in all manner of western arts.

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> Even in film the convention is that if you're character is going back, standing in the way of another character moving the plot forward, or just feeling weak or uncertain, they should face the left.

Related to your comment, even if unrelated to the theme as a whole: “Snowpiercer - Left or Right”[1]. A video essay by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos. Unfortunately they’ve stopped that series[2]; it was easily one of my favourite things on the internet. Off the top of my head I’ll recommend “Jackie Chan - How to Do Action Comedy”[3], “Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy”[4], and “Memories of Murder (2003) - Ensemble Staging”[5].

[1]: https://vimeo.com/110329961

[2]: https://vimeo.com/tonyzhou

[3]: https://vimeo.com/113439313

[4]: https://vimeo.com/96558506

[5]: https://vimeo.com/149936243

Since you asked... About half of the first Castlevania is right-to-left. There are plenty of cues as to where to go, so you never really notice it.

On the other hand -- it's set in an evil castle, with dark muddy colors and a minor-key soundtrack. So maybe the right-to-left motion is intended to make the player feel uncomfortable.

Most of the 2D Castlevania series, really. Later releases like SoTN had the player go back and forth multiple times through certain levels to fully progress, and even had a version of the castle flipped upside down which made the player think on their feet (no pun intended).

Your post plus the context of Factorio brings about an interesting observation that in all of my Factorio maps, expansion/exploration happens rightwards and upwards unless constrained by geography.

Now that you mention it I have a similar observation. Though I tend to build downward rather than upwards when laying out columns of factories coming over a central bus.

Also when constrained by geography I subconsciously have been seeking out new areas with enough space to resume building left to right like a printer executing a carriage return rather than zig zagging backwards (which perhaps could be more efficient).

Since I’ve noticed that factorio mimics a lot of patterns from the real world I wonder if this prevalent in some other areas eg integrated circuit or circuit board layouts.

Axiom Verge (a metroid-vania) starts you off by going to the left first, just like Metroid did.

I love how these kind of conventions are used to guide the player in Super Metroid : https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HugoBille/20120114/90903/The...

Edit: context

Geometry Dash, still probably my favorite game on the iPad, switches between left-to-right and right-to-left suddenly in the middle of levels and it's messing with my brain.

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