Chapter 146: Small Details

"Input compensation?"

The others looked at the words Ethan had written on the whiteboard, all wearing puzzled expressions. It was a term none of them had ever heard before.

"That's right. It'll help us build a nearly perfect platforming control system, that feels precise without feeling punishing."

Smiling, Ethan drew two platforms on the whiteboard with a gap between them. Then he asked an unexpected question.

"Have you guys ever watched cartoons?"

"Huh?"

They exchanged confused glances before Will finally broke the silence.

"You mean Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes and MGM's Tom and Jerry? Of course."

"Exactly!" Ethan snapped his fingers and pulled out a VHS tape of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, sliding it into the projector.

"This idea actually comes from the classic character Wile E. Coyote."

He fast-forwarded the animation to a chase scene.

The Road Runner sprinted across a cliff at incredible speed before coming to an abrupt stop right at the edge. Unable to stop himself, Wile E. Coyote's momentum carried him straight off the cliff.

"Pause! Right there!"

Ethan froze the frame at the perfect moment. Will stared thoughtfully at the image on the screen, and without giving them much time to think, Ethan explained.

"I call this Coyote Time. After running off the edge of a platform, Wile E. Coyote can still keep running in midair for a brief moment and even perform other actions. Don't you think that would be perfect for video games?"

"Oh, I get it!"

Will's eyes lit up. Connecting it to the "perfect jumping" Ethan had mentioned earlier, he immediately understood.

"You mean... after the player runs off the edge of a platform, we still let them jump for a short period?"

"Yeah!" Ethan nodded.

As the gaming industry evolved, side-scrolling platformers, one of the earliest video game genres, had never truly stood still.

Every so often, brilliant new ideas emerged that breathed fresh life into this seemingly ancient genre. Among them, Celeste was undoubtedly one of the finest examples.

"We should look at this from the player's perspective. Players always want to make their actions as efficient as possible."

If damage had random variance, players would naturally pursue the highest possible damage.

If jump distance could vary, players would instinctively try to jump as far as possible, pushing every leap to its absolute limit.

That was simply human nature, the instinctive desire to maximize one's own performance.

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Coyote Time was an optimization built specifically around that instinct, forming one of the fundamental design principles of modern platformers.

"Players naturally try to wait until the very last moment before jumping, because that's how they get the longest jump."

"But the closer they come to that limit, the more likely they are to make mistakes."

As the player approached the platform's edge, both the player's reaction time and the game's detection window became increasingly narrow. Eventually, the character would already have left the ground.

In traditional games, jumping could only be performed while standing on solid ground. After all, nobody wanted a character to suddenly launch upward in midair out of nowhere. Unless, of course, it was an intentionally designed double jump.

That meant that, at the code level, every jump command first needed to check one condition: Is the character grounded?

Once the player had moved even slightly beyond the edge of the platform, the answer became no. As a result, even if the character had only drifted one pixel past the ledge, jumping became impossible.

"From a purely logical standpoint, not being able to jump once you've left the platform is absolutely correct."

"I know!" Will interrupted eagerly. "We should design around the player's experience, not just strict theory!"

"Exactly! If a jump fails for that reason, the frustration players feel is enormous."

Instead of thinking, "I mistimed my jump," most players would assume the game's controls were unresponsive or that they had encountered a bug. Because from the player's perspective, they did press the jump button.

"We can give the player around one hundred milliseconds of reaction time."

"Hm..."

Sid, who had been quietly listening the entire time, finally spoke.

"I think we should also add a buffer before landing."

He approached the problem from a completely different angle.

"If I remember correctly, The King of Fighters has something similar. Before a special move finishes, it already starts reading the player's next input."

A veteran was, after all, a veteran, and his way of thinking was far more flexible.

Ethan laughed.

"That's right! And on top of that, we can implement a reverse version of Coyote Time."

Turning back to the whiteboard, he drew a dotted arc representing the character's jump trajectory. The starting point extended just slightly beyond the edge of the first platform and the landing point stopped just short of the second platform.

"Platform snapping."

"When the player barely misses the opposite platform, we give them a tiny bit of assistance, so they still make the landing."

The room fell silent as everyone stared at the drawing. Nothing more needed to be said. Those three mechanics alone were enough to create a platforming experience unlike anything players had ever seen.

Ethan's claim of creating a "perfect jumping controller" was anything but an exaggeration. Not even Nintendo's flagship Super Mario offered controls at this level.

"However..." After a long silence, Will spoke again. "If we optimize things this much, won't the level design lose all its difficulty?"

Judging from Ethan's design document for Castlevania, this wasn't meant to be an easy, family-friendly platformer like Super Mario. It was intended to be a hardcore experience like Fire Emblem, aimed at dedicated players.

If the controls were polished too much, wouldn't the game lose some of its challenge?

Just like how Fire Emblem never explicitly told players what enemies would do next, whether an attack would hit, or whether a critical strike would trigger. Too much convenience could become a bad thing.

"Will," Kojima adjusted his glasses and replied, "I think that's because this is an action game, not a platformer."

Ethan nodded. "That's right, this is an action game. Ideally, I don't want players spending any mental energy on something as basic as jumping."

"The challenge should come from combat. The monster designs, equipment combinations, ability choices... that's where I want players to focus."

The less attention he wanted players to pay to jumping, the more effort had to go into making it feel effortless. As perfection wasn't about stealing the spotlight, it was about disappearing entirely.

Only when it was perfect could jumping quietly become part of the player's core experience, working seamlessly without ever demanding their attention.

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