Game Design Tip: Heads and Ceilings

It's not particularly fun to hit your head on the ceiling in real life, but it's not very fun to do it in a game either. Yet, after trying out several indie platformers, it seems as though many newer game creators disagree with this observation.

Here's the thing: a ceiling is a limitation, it's something players will want to avoid dealing with and which should be used sparingly. Let's look at some NES platformers for examples of proper ceiling-usage. In any of the Super Mario Bros. games, a low ceiling tends to be used for one of two things; it is either a way of limiting movement when confronting enemies, especially enemies with projectiles, or it serves as something which must be avoided in order to make a jump. In the first situation a ceiling is used to increase the danger an enemy or enemies present and players will usually want to use small hops or horizontal leaps to avoid both projectiles and the ceiling while in the second situation touching the ceiling will usually result in a jump getting cut short and Mario being sent straight into a pit. Otherwise, whenever a player touches a ceiling in a Mario game, it usually results in a tangible reward, such as a 1-UP appearing or, in the case of the first Super Mario Bros. of the limitation the ceiling represents quite literally being broken to grant access to a warp zone. In Mega Man games low ceilings tend to be used as a hazard, again the focus on avoidance, such as by having spikes attached to them, by crushing Mega Man, or, like in Mario's games, by limiting movement when fighting an opponent.

However, what is rare in NES platformers, especially in the ones most people remember, is making a ceiling so low that the player is forced to bang his/her head against it when making a jump. This is likely because it's simply not fun. It's not fun to run into a limitation, it's not fun to be forced to deal with a mechanic which makes the controls feel shoddy as a bounding leap is transformed into an awkward half-hop, and it's certainly not fun to break the momentum of a level because a low ceiling as suddenly transformed an otherwise simple jump into a pixel-perfect deathtrap in which the player must ever-so-slowly inch towards the edge of a platform in order to have a chance of making it to the other side.

This is not ok

Yet, too many indie developers who are just starting out make this mistake. It would be forgivable, even unnoticeable, if it only happened once or twice over the course of the game. Unfortunately, too many games forsake creative, careful, and interesting level design for this lazy, tired, and uninspired gimmick of taking a standard jump and putting a low ceiling over it as a cheap way of making a game 'challenging'. It's bad when this same gimmick is employed nearly every level, it's worse when a chain of such jumps is the most creative 'challenge' most levels contain, and it's utterly inexcusable when such a thing is present in a game with a fixed jump height as such a thing is an even larger taboo on its own.


So please, if you plan to make a game, don't go into it thinking 'how can I make it difficult?', but rather, 'how can I make it fun?'. It's possible to make a game that is both very challenging and very enjoyable to play, but if the only thing you can think of to add challenge to your game is to take a normal jump and place a ceiling over it, then perhaps you should just quit before you start.