Reclamation Project - Part 4: Movement Analysis (Alisia Dragoon)

Alisia has four movement mechanics: walking, crouching, turning around, and jumping. Let's take a look at each one.

Walking, Crouching, and Turning Around

Alisia walking speed is 2 pixels per frame. There's a quirk in the movement where the first frame of movement is only one pixel. This is likely to account for the change from a standing to a walking sprite. A single pixel of movement in one frame isn't noticeable, so this might just be a bug.

Alisia can start and stop walking with no acceleration or momentum at all. The main mechanic that interrupts this is turning around. If you're pressing right and decide to turn left, Alisia will spend 10 frames horizontally locked in place while the turning animation plays.

Alisia can also instantly crouch any time she is walking. She can return to a standing position after 10 frames have passed. Any time after this point she will stand instantly, but a mistaken tap for a couple frames will stick her to the ground for 1/6 of a second. Crouching's main advantage is that the player's hitbox is smaller, allowing her to dodge attacks that would otherwise hit her.

Jumping

Jump time: 52 frames
Jump speed: +4 pixels per frame, decreases by one on frames 11, 16, 21, 29, 32, 36, and 41
Jump height: 69 pixels
Jump width: 106 pixels
Jump ratio: 0.75
Last input frame: 20

 

 Visual plot of jump data

Figuring out how to calculate jump height on a character can be a bit tricky. Alisia's jumping sprite doesn't change her leg position, so I picked a single pixel and tracked that across the entire jump. Each change in position was measured against the previous one and manually plotted in GIMP. I had to double-check each keyframe to make sure that the velocity was changing and to get a good idea of how the visual interacted with the controls.

Jump ratio is calculated by taking half of the jump length and dividing that by the jump height. The higher that number, the flatter the curve appears. The last estimated frame for controlling jump height is a guess; I'm not interested in replicating the movement exactly, just in getting an idea of how it works. Other stats should be self-explanatory

This whole process isn't hard... but it is tedious. Creating the chart took around 45 minutes from start to finish.

 

Tracking pixel

Jump mechanics can be divided up into three parts. These are divided up into boost, hang time, and fall, which are red, green, and purple respectively.

Boost is the most important part, as the player has direct control over this period. Many games with a platforming system have a mechanic where holding the button longer lets the player jump higher. Older games tend to do this in a more obvious way, cutting off upward momentum directly after the button is released.

Momentum at the top of a jump is called "hang time". In general, this is the period of time where the character hangs out in the air before they begin to fall but after any control the player has relinquished. Some games will go out of their way to extend control all the way into this phase. Having that sort of control tends towards cartoony physics.

Fall happens on the downward direction. All control over the vertical direction has been lost and gravity takes over.

Because of the way hang time works, her minimum jump curve looks like this:

Alisia's jump appears to be a smooth ballistic arc. While she does jump lower when the button is released sooner, she still jumps in an arc that looks reasonable because the cutoff of boost still has upward momentum. The game doesn't differentiate between hang time and fall from a mechanical standpoint, but falling animations do play on the way down.

Jumping and walking control independently. The player has full control over how the player moves sideways in the same way as walking happens, down to getting stuck in the air with a turning animation.

Subjectively, Alisia feels like she falls a bit faster than she rises. She also appears to jump higher than she. The graph shows that she loses speed a lot quicker on the way down than the way up and is better at jumping up than out. The entire jump feels basic and a bit quirky, but it works. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

One advantage to a low jump ratio is that your character is a lot better at jumping over incoming projectiles. Another advantage is better vertical movement. Neither of these ideas are present. There's only one set of projectiles in the entire game all the way at the final boss to jump over and platforming is full of small, incremental jumps.

Contrast that with the crouch mechanic: Having a hard 10 frames where you're stuck on the ground means that you've committed to the choice, but have access to it immediately. There's a lot of enemies that pull out spears or fly directly at your head. These enemies are sprinkled throughout the game from the beginning to the end

 

Single hop stairs

The way I would describe this type of movement is "serviceable". The focus in this game is on combat and reflexes. You're able to move the character around with a large amount of flexibility, and the 1/6 second that it takes to turn Alisia around or duck means you have to move forward strategically. It's somewhere between purposeful and twitchy, overall basic, and works well enough. The focus is more on combat anyhow

Final thoughts

Alisia's walking speed is 2 pixels per second. How fast is this compared to the real world? Well... we don't have a ruler to measure the game by. The entire game is set in a high fantasy setting with an emphasis on trying to make things look good. Nothing in-game, in the manual, or from the developers indicates a canon height for any element, and all the sizes for things are wildly off from what we would expect to see by taking a hike anywhere.

My best guess based on this screen is that Alisia is very small, perhaps thumb sized. The alternative is that she's human sized and her entire world is full of gigantic trees and bugs. As with anything in a world that plays fast and loose with sizes, we can't really know.

Trying to relate these numbers to a real world situation is like trying to write down how time works in a black hole. We can make some assumptions about how it works based on our math, measurements, and theories, but any attempt to make real use of it will end up breaking your brain, crashing your computer, and eating your soul. Best not to think about that too much.

Scale? Rulers? Who says what is real and what is false?