Side Scrollers: Competitive Analysis

Hey guys! For this post I wanted to get into something a bit more analytical. I thought it might be interesting to dig into some side scrolling games and do a competative analysis of their visual strategies. What are their common elements? What ways do they facilitate the player’s understanding of themselves in the playspace? What strategies do they use to aid in the game’s narrative? For this analysis I took a look at the following games; Broforce, Fez, Inside, Little Big Planet, Never Alone, Oddworld, Oxenfree, Rayman Legends, Salt and Sanctuary, and Super Meat Boy. I know that Oxenfree might be a little outside the normal side scrolling spectrum, yet there are a couple of elements I wanted to include. You shouldn’t have to worry about spoilers below, I’ll be including imagery from these different titles but won’t be discussing game narrative.
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How do I understand the gameworld?
-What strategies are used so players understand the playspace?​

Generally in all side scrolling games, there are the same rules for differentiating the foreground from the background. It’s all about large areas of contrast, where the background has implied atmospheric perspective, simulated with less value contrasts or lighter hues. Games like Super Meat Boy, Broforce, and Oddworld use 

these similar strategies. Detail and definition go a long way to aid in the player’s understanding of the place space. By having clear differentiation between the foreground and the background, the player understands the avenues available to them. To that end the foreground elements also tend to be simplified shapes or tileable textures in these instances. Just as it’s important for the background and foreground to be separated, it’s equally 

important for the foreground to not compete with the game character or interactable elements. Little Big Planet uses these same methods, but goes one step further to add a blurring depth of field effect to the background. By blurring the backdrop the foreground/background differentiation is more defined, it also helps add to the general theme of the game and the feeling of being a small character in a big world. ​​

How do I understand where I am in the gameworld?
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While looking through these games, I noticed some different strategies being used to help aid in the player’s comprehension of their character and placement within the game scene. First and foremost is the use of the camera. In many cases the camera remains fixed on the character as they jump and move through the environment. Games like Fez, Little Big Planet, and Salt and Sanctuary typically keep the character fixed at the center of the screen. In some other cases the camera is more fixed on the level and moves with the player when 

they transition to a new area. Games like Oxenfree, Inside, and Never Alone use this type of camera in most cases. I find it’s very situational and depends on goals of the game. In scenes where the player has to complete a puzzle, having a static screen where your character navigates the pieces of the puzzle might make more sense. In other games like Rayman Legends, speed and flow are very important and in order to not lose your character, it’s beneficial to have the camera follow your avatar through the game space. Yet in some levels of Rayman Legends, I found that the camera would actually switch to the static model when the player is introduced to a puzzle.
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Beyond the use of the camera, I found these games had a variety of other visual ques used to focus the player’s attention to their avatar. In the game “Inside” I believe it was a very intentional choice to have the protagonist wearing a red shirt. Most of “Inside’s” levels feature a very cold and dark atmosphere, which allows the warm hued player to stand out. I also found that Fez was a curious case, as it used color value in a slightly different way than many of it’s competitors. I noticed that in many games we use a wide range of dark and light values to make up the character, and differentiate it from the background. Yet in Fez, by maintaining the character as a singular solid and giving it the brightest value in the scene, it accomplishes the same effect. While Backgrounds are created in a very similar method to games like super meat boy, broforce, etc where we differentiate the foreground from the background via large tonal and value differences. The character still maintains the brightest value and grabs the user’s attention.
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Super Meat Boy makes use of a deep and dark red “smear” where you’ve bounced the avatar around, this gives the player a quick indication of where they’ve been. Doing so helps ground the player and also aids in quickly identifying where they are in the level. Super Meat boy runs off of the idea that players will attempt levels multiple times and so this mechanic facilitates a quick and easy visual que of the player’s history. As players attempt the same level, over and over, this gives sense of progression as layers of “blood” accumulate along the walls of the level.
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In Rayman Legends the characters and the environment can be very close in hue, and yet we can still identify them off of the backdrop. What I noticed is that when you take screenshots from the game and remove their hue, you can more easily see their strategy. The characters have a more drastic contrast of dark to light areas than the landscape behind them. These characters maintain the darkest shadows and the brightest highlights, while the background and foreground elements are more muted. By maintaining larger value contrasts for the characters and interactable items, these elements pop themselves off of the landscape. Even by maintaining similar hues, we can still identify our characters and navigate our way through each level.

What Visual strategies can I use to supplement the game’s narrative?
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Something that I noticed while reviewing Rayman Legends is how important flow is for their level design. The player is encouraged to speed through levels, time their jumps precisely, and the general feeling is meant to be rhythmic and exciting. I began to map out the flow of player movement through different levels and discovered something pretty interesting. Through areas that are meant to feel easy or rewarding, the levels have the players going downhill. Conversely when levels are meant to be hard or stressful, the levels pitch upward… forcing the player to go uphill. This is a really subtle but interesting mechanic, that works within our own affordance of the world… Downhill is easy and feels good, while going uphill is hard. Whether this was intentional or not, could be open to debate, but interesting to note.

Inside makes clever use of perspective and drawing the user’s attention to important areas. In most cases our eyes are being drawn to something in the background that facilitates the game story. In other cases this same trick is used to grab the player’s attention to obstacles or something dangerous. In the reference, our eye is being drawn to a pack of dogs… that the player needs to understand is coming their way.

Perhaps Oxenfree’s strongest mechanic is it’s dialogue system. Not only is it well written and voice acted, but the controls are intuitive and easy to learn. While reviewing the game, I noticed that all of the dialogue boxes actually had the same value… even when they had different colors. This is a really interesting trick, as it made sure that each box has the same level of clarity and one does not stand out above the rest.

If you were to start working on a side scrolling game, I hope that this brief analysis of different strategies gave some insight into possible directions to take. In these games the player’s understand of the game space, and their location in it, is paramount. There’s a lot of different ways that we can facilitate this understanding through visuals ques. Not only that, but we can emphasize the narrative structure of the game through choices in level design and layout.

Thanks for reading! Hope this was an interesting segway from the typical posts. Looking ahead I may be looking into a post regarding a game I’m currently playing called “Orwell.” If you haven’t heard about it, I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot. Until next time!