If a game is designed for infrequent failures, sending the player back to an easier point can help them build both skills and confidence, games like Sonic 2 and 3. Sending the player back to an earlier point, often the start of a world but sometimes the start of the whole game, can actually be beneficial.

In contrast, 2D platformers with lives tend to have benefits to including Game Overs (or at least they should, they’re often just included as a legacy feature). In these games there are essentially no benefits to sending the player back to a much earlier point for dieing too much. There are consequences to death, but they are minor, as checkpoints are very common. Super Meat Boy and Celeste don’t have lives systems because the player is expected to fail very frequently (this is also why they have much shorter respawn times than Mario games).

Though lives are a staple of 2d Platformers, there are many games that don’t and shouldn’t use them. You must decide as a game designer whether you even want that, and when you do, whether a lives system is the best tool to provide such consequences. The main job of a lives system is to provide serious consequences for repeated failures.

Lives are a design tool, and like any tool they aren’t suited for every job. Most games probably shouldn’t use a lives system, just like most games shouldn’t use a crafting system. They’re often just thought experiments that I have no intention of acting on. I must stress that ideas presented in these blogs are not guaranteed to be in the game when it’s finished. But a lot of games don’t use them and wouldn’t benefit from them if they did. Personally, I believe lives can be a good design choice, when used as a resource to manage for example. AKR1 and 2 had lives systems, but only because I was blindly copying existing Mario games without questioning them, and not because of a well thought out decision making process. This week, we’re talking about lives and 1ups. Last time, we discussed and dismissed the prospect of multiple alternate endings to the game. Welcome to the fifth installment of the A Koopa’s Revenge 3 Idea Blogs, the series wherein I discuss ideas I have for AKR3 (Ideas that are not at all guaranteed to be used in the final game, and often explicitly stated not to).

A koopas revenge 2