Gold for Health - how to reward your skilled players

So, I was playing A Hat in Time recently and there was one thing that bothered me (well, actually two things, but I can complain about 3D platformer cameras some other day) and that was the health pick-ups. I know it's only a little thing, but it really annoyed me that I could be at full health, run over a health item and I would pick it up. That meant if I got hit on the next platform, I couldn't just double back to grab it; it was gone forever. This really wound me up, and I couldn't really place why this was such a big deal to me.

Then I remembered playing Rayman Origins (AKA maybe the greatest 2D platformer of all time, that's right fuck off Super Mario World), and how it dealt with this "problem". In Origins, you can only carry one additional heart, and picking up any more simply adds an additional five lums (the game's primary collectible) onto the players count. This is genius.

In fact, I'll go one better and say this is near-perfect game design. Less talented players get a much needed leg-up in the form of more health, where-as more experienced players receive a reward for their demonstrations of skill. The best part about this is the reward doesn't really matter; a lot of the time these five bonus lums are negligible, yet obtaining them still give the feeling of accomplishment. Like-wise, if implemented in A Hat in Time, five or ten additional "Pons" would have a near-zero impact on the gameplay as a whole, but would change the impact of picking up health items from one of banality into one of achievement.

So this mechanic I like to call "gold for health", and should be an important consideration for anyone making a platformer game, or in fact any game with a health-pickup mechanic. It's unfortunately not a universal fix (in collectathon games like Spyro or Banjo, for example, handing out additional collectibles would break the game entirely) but it would work in enough of them to be considered an important tool in a game dev's kit.

And it would make me enjoy your games more, and that's clearly the most important thing here.

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