I was reading this excellent academic literature on platform level design and rhythm. The paper describes how well designed platform levels are composed of small challenges dubbed “rhythms.” These rhythms have some pretty close parallels to musical rhythms, and can be designed in small chunks.
This, coupled with a tweet from @rockleesmile got me thinking: Can you use make levels from text created with these modular “rhythms”? The basic game idea is to make your tweets playable games. Each letter or word will represent one of these platform rhythms. Each challenge will be able to lead into the next (after a buffer area maybe) so that the levels will theoretically be as varied as the language (heh).
(Truthfully, I am not too into the language part, I am more interested in platform mechanics)
There are a lot of options, like having certain words change the level. Or have double letters do something. or vowels? For now I am just trying to come up with 26 basic platform “rhythms”.
If you would like to check out the rhythms I have already designed, they are available here. You can also edit them or add your own if you’d like.
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