Robots Can't Jump Over Rivers?

The name of the blog is actually based on an in-joke with a friend of mine, which first started with a game I made ages ago called Samurai + Ninja. It was a coop game where one person had to fight through waves of enemies as the Samurai, while the Ninja player could move vertically, and had to dodge guards while opening gates or otherwise helping out the Samurai.

It wasn't bad, but I made one very questionable design choice: I didn't allow air movement for the Ninja after jumping. My thinking was that it would require more skill from the Ninja player, as well as being more natural. Of course, what it really meant was that as the Ninja you ended up constantly missing jumps and getting stuck on walls - you could slide down them and wall jump, but without being able to control yourself once in the air, it made it tricky to recover from one bad jump, to say the least. There was much flailing around, which rather detracted from the feeling of being a ninja.  

It was a dumb decision, and my friend would frequently remind me of it!

A later game I worked on was Robot War Tactics. This had the purple robots and rivers referenced in the title. On seeing the various colourful robot foes next to a river, my friend asked if they could jump over the rivers... then answered his own question based on the fact that I couldn't make Ninjas which could jump properly, so what were the odds of robots being able to do so?* And there we had robots that can't jump over rivers. I also liked the alliteration.


*In fact, within the game were special robots with jetpacks who actually could jump over rivers. Of course, that wasn't the point.