How Bionic Bay Shaped Tight Platforming Around Its Unique…

While many video games can be enjoyed in different ways, there's something to be said about how platformers can focus on a mix of exploration, precision, and high-speed action depending on how players approach them. Bionic Bay aims to mix all three classic platformer features in a way that is visually striking and rewarding in gameplay. As a scientist who has managed to fall deep into a biomechanical facility in a freak accident, players will discover forgotten creations that will give them the means to overcome all sorts of obstacles.

The Best War Games recently spoke with Bionic Bay artist and designer Juhana Myllys about the game and how it became a platformer with so much to offer with its snappy, simplistic controls. Myllys spoke about how working with teleportation, gravitational control, and time manipulation kept development interesting from a developmental and playtesting standpoint. In particular, the item swap mechanic is an important aspect of Bionic Bay, as the rest of the game took shape around it.

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By Dalton Cooper

Bionic Bay's Swap Mechanic is Why the Game Exists

At first glance, Bionic Bay's dystopian yet colorful design is a showstopper. In the trailers, players are offered a glimpse of a world that has fallen into disarray, ominously merged with nature. They're invited to jump, dive, roll, and even make the laws of reality into their plaything to see all it has to offer. While it may be easy to think that Bionic Bay was conceptualized as this strange biomechanical maze, Myllys has stated that the challenging platforming game was conceptualized with its swap mechanic in mind first:

"It was actually the other way around: First, we had the ideas; the core mechanic, the Swap, a realistically moving human character, and tons of fun mechanics to throw at him. After that, it was about figuring out what kind of world would best support mechanics like this. I felt that if the world was too realistic, some of the most creative or just purely fun ideas might feel out of place. But on the other hand, if the world was too weird or abstract, it might be hard to relate to as it just wouldn’t feel real enough."

The way the swap mechanic led to every other creative decision with Bionic Bay to follow can be felt as fans learn the controls and explore the factory's sections. The blend between exaggeration and realism can be seen in how the scientist moves with the game's tight controls: each action, like jumping or rolling, has an immediate effect, which keeps to the rhythm of the player's button presses. Each of these moves must exist within the physics of Bionic Bay, however, which takes a more realistic approach to add depth behind jumping, diving, and even swapping items.

According to Myllys, this balance in motion is partly thanks to programmer Xiaofong Huang, who ensured the animations worked smoothly on the technical end. However, Myllys also works as a level designer and took pains to ensure bumps in the road would not cause Huang's work to be presented unfaithfully. Rigorously playtesting the maps so that no animation glitches would occur has helped develop Bionic Bay even further, leading the team to devise new ideas for tricky puzzles and difficult platforming challenges that leverage the game's unique mechanics.

Bionic Bay's Leaderboards Encourage Competition and Improvement

Playtesting eventually led to Bionic Bay featuring an online leaderboard mode that encourages speedrunning. Myllys has stated that frequent work on the game motivated the developers to organically challenge themselves to be faster with each run, which inspired Bionic Bay Online. Using ghost data, players can race one another, putting the skills they learn during the main campaign to the test with tweaks to streamline the gameplay for even faster times.

Bionic Bay not only looks visually impressive, but it also expresses a love for platformers and how learning the ins and outs of movement systems can lead to new challenges. For gamers on the fence about buying Bionic Bay, a Steam demo is available that includes the online leaderboards. Players are encouraged to try out the demo before jumping into any Bionic Bay Online challenges, as there is a substantial learning curve between the two. Considering just how many levels to Bionic Bay there are from what was revealed before launch, players will have a lot of ground to cover before potentially using Bionic Bay Online as a fun post-game challenge.