I've already done a fair bit of thought on this subject but I'm curious about everyone else's ideas. I'm prototyping a game demo essentially around the idea that there isn't enough depth in adventure game locomotion. The way I see it, the standard approach is very flat and uninteresting, and makes for huge stretches of game time spend holding down one button and being bored. I believe the standard approach is essentially when a direction is pressed, rotate the character model that direction, move forward, and turn on the run cycle. Blah. Besides being flat and feeling like a generic game piece most of the time (although Rune Johansen made a very handy tool to prevent just that for Unity engine). I understand why you would want to do it that way of course, it's handy for precise and predictable control. But oftentimes when levels are simply poorly designed, I personally find it dull as hell. So how motion be spiced up without taking too much from precision and without being made too frustrating? In most Mario games, there's a slight inertia effect (especially when you play as Luigi), which isn't quite as effective as it was in the sidescrollers but still adds something. Loads of flash games use very interesting locomotion systems that might not necessarily be ideal for an adventure game, but are very interesting and fun to play, and of course racing games are entirely built around moving being a fun and interesting mechanic, though they especially are no good for most dungeon crawling. So, since I've already posed myself the same challenge, I ask you: how would you make your game if there could be no interactive elements except your character itself? How would you make your character move?

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But oftentimes when levels are simply poorly designed, I personally find it dull as hell.

If the levels are poorly designed, the levels are poorly designed and the game'll suck because of it. Regular movement or more interesting movement isn't really going to help that.

I think the big problem with trying to spice things up is that, for the most part, you want movement to be as transparent and simple as possible, because it's... well, more of an interface behavior. You don't want gameplay mechanics get all up ins, there.

The inertia in Mario, for instance... I don't think that's to make the gameplay more interesting per se but rather because real life objects have inertia and applying that to game objects makes Mario control more smoothly and more predictably and, in general, it just makes it easier for the user to grasp how motion works.

I guess a negative example of that would be the grapple beam in Super Metroid, which I was playing fairly recently. That doesn't behave at all in accordance to normal, real-world physics, which actually makes it HARDER to control.

Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't incorporate movement as a gameplay element. What I AM saying is that, if you do, it's going to be so pervasive that it's going to have to be the central, core gameplay mechanic that you build the REST of the game in relation to.

And it can have amazing results. Case in point, Exile for the BBCA, which is easily the most [expletive erased] impressive sidescroller I've ever played.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_%28arcade_adventure%29

When you consider 'movement', you have to consider the action that's taking place in all of its forms.

What is moving forward? Controlling forward momentum.
So how do you break it down?
Friction, Inertia and Energy Expenditure.

You use friction to propel yourself forward.
Creating different surfaces with different levels of friction create different levels of control.
Inertia, which would be the force forward and then the force required to stop, it does relate to friction, but also weight, heavier things have more mass, consequently, they require more force to move forward and stop.
And then the third thing, nobody can run and jump about forever. That stuff is tiring. The amount of energy expended is directly tied to the last two things.

As well as the more physics oriented mass and gravity, which brings up the issue of torque and applied torque.
Movement is only simple and boring on the surface, there are several modifiers at your disposal.
If movement is such an integral part of your project, take them into consideration.