is "maddeningly replaying the first level of the game that inspired your project over and over to reverse engineer the mechanics" like, a normal part of game development or
Yeah, actually!
I don't know how much this plays to what you're saying but if I'm working on something like, say, Sonic inspired, I'll play the game again, and again, and again, and again - sometimes even recording footage, just to take it, frame by frame, slow motion, even - to really study everything down to the pixels. Animations, physics, all of that - even if you don't plan on going super far with something, it's a great study
Would you believe me if i told you i did that EXACT thing with sonic robo blast 2 last night, specifically to figure out if it had coyote time/jump buffer or not
(i don't think it does--instead of coyote time it seems to be based on if the drop shadow is touching the ground, which is slightly wider than the playerrmodel (edit: i don't think this is true actually?). it seems to be perfectly aligned with a cylindrical collision shape going by what i observed when looking at slopes. jump buffer doesn't seem to be much of a factor because there's air abilities that get activated when you hit the jump button mid-air, so it causes minimal problems and doesn't feel that unfair in the rare situation that it could've been helpful. if anyone knows more about how this game's physics work or can tell me how to find the code that dictates this my asks are open)
