I''d like to hear about accidentially born gameplay features in various games, that turned out to make the game a lot better. Such as rocket jumping in Quake, which was then hard coded into Quake 2 (shooting yourself gave a lot larger push than shooting at enemy, so that rocket jumping would be possible). Or that Subspace, a 2d online space shooter, has only 32 turning angles, which allows people to do trick shots: Just find the correct location from the environment, turn to right angle (easy due to 32 steps) and you can be several screens away from the target and still hit it always. With smoother angles this would''ve been impossible. An additional example from Quake is bunny hopping: Turning makes the player''s speed rise, and by jumping the speed won''t be decreased by friction. Thus by jumping and turning continuously one can make the player move a lot faster. I wouldn''t want to see players jump and turn like this in Counter Strike, but for Quake-style arcade game it was a nice feature that only good players could do, and gave yet another aspect for players to master. Maybe it sounds weird why I want to hear about accidentially born features and not great features in general. But these accidentially born features are usually pretty weird, that in some cases couldn''t have been born by design. In some unfortunate cases, these bugs are fixed in sequels (like was done in Subspace''s sequel), making the sequel a lot worse in that aspect.

I remain unconvinced by the story that rocket-jumping in Quake was an accidental feature - one of the secret levels in the original Doom (Episode 3) can only be reached by the Doom equivalent of a rocket jump (or by cheating). Since Doom was around for a while before Quake came out, and they both came from the same company, something doesn''t seem to quite add up there...

I always thought jumping up and down in FPS was the stupidest idea ever. Its detracts so much from the realisim of those games when you have a bunch of people jumping up down in one spot and not getting hit. There should either be no jumping, or very very small jumps only enough to move a head shot to a body shot and require the player to rest after the jump for a second or two. Afterall in counter strike your not fighting on the moon so people shouldn''t be jumping along the map like they where.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

GTA (the original) had some things like these. I don''t remember many of those bugs, but one was that if you parked right next to a fence, you could go through the fence while exiting the car. Some of these things were quite fun to do in multiplayer (and in single player too).

In the original super mario bros. for NES, it was a bug that you could jump up on top of the level. They did not intend on that to happen. After realizing this, they decided to implement it into the game somehow, resulting in the warp zones.

Divinus Entertainment
Land of Relics Art Director
http://divinus.net

Skiing in Tribes. Basically you could gain speed boosts by 'skiing' down hills. This was a bug which got carried over into T2.

Conc (and other) jumping in TF/TFC.

Jumping - depends on game and world. In a mod like TFC jumping high has simply become part of the game. Meds and scouts rely on the bunny hop and conc jumping, otherwise they wouldn't stand a chance. Mods like FLF had huge penalties for jumping (both stamina and accuracy) which made bunny hopping useless when fighting or moving (stamina meant that as you kept jumping, your jumps got lower and lower).
I don't know how CS handles this, I only played it briefly before going back to FLF, although it sounds from the above that bunny hopping has become part of the game.


[edited by - JuNC on September 5, 2003 2:59:00 PM]

This happened in my game! (Available in this gamedev thread)

My game was originally a paper game, at least when I was designing it. It had a special tile that was made so that each "pawn" that moved on it was destroyed. If you pushed more than one pawns on a tile, they were meant to get destroyed too.

Then I created a dos version of the game, and a bug made it so for a short while after destroying a pawn, that special tile worked as a wall, preventing other pawns from entering it. Instead of correcting it once I found it, I decided to implement it correctly and expand it to all other tiles that could interfer with pawns, because it offered a few unexpected gameplay possibilities.

In the download available in that other thread, the level 10 of the "Demo Levels" pack demonstrates how this trick can be used to solve a level.

ToohrVyk



[edited by - ToohrVyk on September 5, 2003 4:00:38 PM]