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The bread and butter of a platformer is traversal. I will highlight some of the design in mechanics.
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The core mechanic of the game, you can jump in and out of the wires at anytime. Normally, the wires will make you travel where you are facing, but I implemented an exception which made it so that a wire would travel only in one direction if a teammate needed it.
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All the attacks are performed with the same button, and each has its own hidden mechanics to make the gameplay feel better.
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This attack is used to deal with the deal with the basic enemy of the game. A hidden passive that I put into this attack is that it will stop your movement but let you rotate once you perform it, this allows the player to “aim it” if they missed, but still leaves the player vulnerable if they missed.
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An attack used to deal with shielded enemies and basic enemies. The hidden passive of this attack is that it gives you a small impulse while going up, nothing significant but it could help you adjust your jump, the second hidden passive is that if you hit an enemy with this it will give you a small vertical boost, similar to a pogo jump.
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This attack comes out when you are inside wires. Its an explosion that takes down flying enemies. It has a hidden mechanic in which the attacks doesn’t stop if you pop out of the wire while performer.
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While you are in the air, if you press yourself against a wall and press jump, you will be impulsed backwards (from the direction the character s facing) and up, similar to the classic 3D Mario walljump.
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I made it so that the Jump has coyote time (this is to make it so that the platforming doesn’t feel unfair or frame perfect) and also, the more you hold the jump button, the higher you jump, this means if you just tap it, the character will just perform a short hop, this is to give the player more agency over how high they wish their jump to go.
Systems
There are 2 main systems that tie the mechanics together:
Health: when a robot hits you, your package will fall and they will try to take it away, a timer will appear and if you fail to recover the package before the timer runs out, you will fail and go back to the last checkpoint.
Energy: Attacks and walljumping cost electricity (the circle on the top left corner), you can charge back up by riding the wires.
Gameplay loop
The game consists of 5 levels in which you have an objective to reach and there are platforming challenges that the player can tackle the way they prefer. Similar to a 3D Mario game’s way of doing things: Present the player with a place to reach and design “skill puzzles” between the objective and the player. Fighting the robots is optional and they are more of an obstacle implemented into the challenges to bring variety to them. Most of the player’s engagement relies on the variety of challenges provided to them and the feeling of accomplishment once they progress.
Level Design
I was tasked with making the final level, level 5. From the very beginning I thought “I want to make a festival, that way I can have fireworks and decoration lights on the wires as you go through rooftops” easier said than done. It was a challenging process, as my first source of inspiration was “Radical Highway” from Sonic Adventure 2. The size of the buildings being immense and a lot would require different models from the modular kit I had yet to design. For the second iteration I tried a semi-circle city approach, I quickly scrapped that away as trying to make the level progress on a HUB in the center which you eventually open up parts of to traverse through the city quickly and then finally reach the top of the center.
So the third iteration I made was a bit different, I thought of the buildings as “small highlights” and thought of how to make each building and their traversal challenge different and unique from the other (football field, billboard hallway, spiral building, and other ideas). I am pretty happy with the result, as each main building is decorated differently, there is also a sewer section in which you go down to as a throwback to level 3, with a train as a throwback to level 4. The only new thing I introduced in the level was the final gauntlet, which just required you to defeat all the robots in the final building to progress.
I had the privilege of collaborating with a talented group of individuals on the development of the Live Wire:
I want to extend a special thanks to Kennedy Kimber-Johnson for providing the soundtrack and also Thomas Sutherland for his guidance and help programming.