I need to vent about a small pet peeve of mine. The matter being how many game developers don’t seem quite able to intelligently solve the issue of how to design games that use the gap between the upper and lower screens on the DS.
You really have two options as the developer; ignore the gap, allowing objects to “seamlessly” transfer from one screen to the other, or allow things to temporarily “disappear” between the screens as they make their way from one to the other. Really the issue presented isn’t one that is the developers’ fault. Nintendo made a system that came with a fairly necessary breakup between their two screens due to the hinge mechanism on the system. But one would think, or even hope, that developers could look at their own game being developed and understand how they should treat the gap.
Let’s look at a very basic example. In Elite Beat Agents, there are periodically graphic montages that take up the height of both screens. If you pay attention, the game actually does cut out the portion of the image in between the screens – the illusion is that the player doesn’t notice anything is missing, while if they had tried to just cut the image into two halves things would almost certainly look “strange” near the gap, whether or not the player consciously picked up on why it looked odd.
It admittedly gets trickier when you get into gameplay that has these moving parts. A puzzle game is fairly simple – with very few exceptions, the designer should have objects move directly from one screen to another. But in an action game, one should really examine how the gameplay will be affected based on how you handle the gap. In Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, boss battles that spanned both screens typically let objects disappear in the gap. And while the potential negative effect of this approach is that the player may get confused or feel like the game is “cheap” in hiding something that suddenly appears, what really happens is the player’s brain accounts for most objects transferring between screens and knows that if something went into the gap at Point A, moving at a certain rate of speed, it should exit the gap and appear at Point B on the other screen. It isn’t even a conscious thought most times, the brain simply treats the gap like a solid bar hiding what is behind it.
Then you have games like Bubble Bobble Revolution. This game allows you to take your dinosaur character between the two screens and allows the bad guys to do the same… but the game noticeably does NOT recognize the gap and rather the designers chose to let objects transfer directly from one screen to the other. The problem here is twofold. For one, the brain does not know how to handle such a transfer since it does not automatically expect something at the bottom of the top screen to seamlessly “jump” to the top of the bottom screen. The “bar” that was blocking content in another game no longer exists. Secondly, the gap between the screens is just enough that things moving between screens while in motion can often appear to even jump horizontally as they make the transition, even if the transition makes perfect sense in a pixel-perfect world. What the developer has now done is create a confusing, uncomfortable game experience for the player when perhaps more consideration should have been paid to how the gap was going to affect the gameplay.
I’m not saying that you should always “lose” content to the gap. Far from it. But please, game designers, THINK when making your game. Which method works best for what you are trying to achieve? And if neither solution seems to be a clear winner… should your game really be switching between the screens in the first place? Perhaps re-thinking the game idea entirely could save your title.