When asked about the origin of their game and the engine behind it, Cedric and Ludovic (the co-founders) said: “Back in 2011, after several months of hard work, we had built a solid 2D platformer engine. It had allowed us to notably release "Platformance: Castle Pain" and "Platformance: Temple Death", 2 games that were well appreciated by the gamers, especially hardcore ones. We had also developed a technology which allowed us to explore a seamless world (no in-game loading)”.
After those small and highly motivating successes, Magiko Soft started to think about the idea of creating a platformer that takes place in a huge seamless world! When asked about the first prototype born from this idea, one of the developers said “I remember a gigantic world composed of only little linear platforms, with a target to reach. I remember my 9 years old nephew would play for hours in this minimal world!”
From September 2011, the two friends would start to meet-up more often and started to have a better idea of the first step for Platformines’ design: “Unlike a well-known game based on blocks, we thought about the fog: Rather than discovering new areas by deleting existing blocks, why not simply fill the world with fog :)? Then you only need to remove this fog when you have discovered a zone, and you obtain an environment that allows fluid movements and keeps the pleasure of exploration!”
Then Ludovic and Cedric thought that it was time to think about the second step: the randomly generated worlds! “After several attempts, a prototype showed us that we had to consider a world based on 1000x1000 blocks squares! We then started to work on several ways to build those block-based environments. Soon after those experiments, we managed to create a generic 2D algorithm to match blocks, and we also found a way to build new zones by juxtaposing predefined patterns”
According to the developers, the next step was all about magic, “C hanging the parameters and realizing what kind of world we can obtain was absolutely astounding! We started to note all the most interesting parameters and patterns in order to apply them for the final game”.
“Et voilà!” This is how the environment of Platformines is born!
