Hacker News Reader

Comment by keyP | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to see if that was a game design decision to allow for the game to be more dramatic.

There's something called "Coyote Time" which is named after Wile E. Coyote and him staying in the air for a few seconds before gravity takes effect. Often in platformers, there's an invisible collision box added after cliffs so that if the user was slightly late pressing jump at the edge of the cliff, they would still make it as the invisible collision box would provide an extra step. It's an example of improving gameplay and game feel without being realistic.

View on HN

Having your ship's hitbox be a single pixel is pretty standard in bullet-hell games. I'd say "drama" probably figured into that choice, it's really common to see enemies shoot out a little arc of bullets that slowly spread out as they travel, and watching a decent player fly their ship right through the gaps in that arc is cool.

> It would be interesting to see if that was a game design decision to allow for the game to be more dramatic.

It is, it's called "grazing."

Small hitboxes are just small hitboxes. "Grazing" specifically means closely approaching things that are harmful to touch, usually because the game rewards it in some way. This makes the game more fun by encouraging the player to take risks. It's been around for a long time, but AFAIK the first game to use it as a core mechanic was Psyvariar (2000), where it's used to power up your ship.

Seems like it should be older than this. Lotus Land Story (Touhou Project #4) has a graze counter, but being a doujin game it should be riffing off of other games that use graze for scoring or as a mechanic.

Ah interesting, not come across that term for game design, thanks!

It's a term used by players more so than designers I think - you usually get more points or something for getting as close as possible to bullets without getting hit, and some really dense patterns will require it, because the bullet sprites will practically be filling the screen.

It's possibly also worth mentioning for people unfamiliar with danmaku games that most are one hit kills against the player.

If it's called Coyote Time, then the box needs to disappear after the grace period, right? I mean if someone stops over the invisible box and never presses the button they should fall after all.

There's a few ways of implementing these input grace periods. For example just allowing jumps to trigger within a time period after last contact with the ground. No extra collision needed. It doesn't need to be taken too literally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com