Rocket Jumping: A Bad Idea Gone Horribly Right

I figure I've laid down the necessary groundwork to discuss this blog's title mechanic. If you haven't already, check out my post on the Entry Barrier and Skill Ceiling metrics, because they're important for this discussion.

In this post, I'm going to have a go at breaking down and discussing why I love rocket jumping so much. For the poor sheltered souls who've never seen a rocket jump before, here's a video of someone performing Quake Live's rocket jump tutorial:

It took me much longer to beat this tutorial

So rocket jumping is about using an explosive to propel yourself some distance, and it's called rocket jumping because it's typically done with a rocket launcher. Simple, right? Not quite. This trick takes a while to master because it requires precision and lightning speed to pull off in the middle of a tense deathmatch, but you can punt yourself across the room with relative ease. Despite being easy to begin using, it takes practice to get the most bang out of your buck, which is the key reason why rocket jumping is so awesome - Its result is not just win or fail, which means it's not a 'boolean action'.

A boolean action is something that will either succeed or fail, with no middle ground. As an example, in Street Fighter you need to press some combination of buttons to successfully perform your special move. If you don't perform that combination just right, your character might wiggle around a bit because you were mashing the arcade stick, but that's about it. If you were to graph how much hadouken you did versus how accurately you performed the combo, it'd look like this:

Graphs like this will be commonplace on this blog.

This is not the case with rocket jumping. You could perform all of the required actions with different timings and achieve wildly different results - Assuming you're just trying to get to achieve height, you could reach anywhere from just over regular jump height to the dizzying heights of a well-performed rocket jump. The values at work in this equation are the player's current velocity and his distance from the rocket's point of impact. If you jump a split second before the rocket explodes (meaning you fire and then jump), your velocity is at its highest point and your distance from the rocket's blast is at its lowest, so the effect is quite substantial. But if you're at the apex of a jump and then fire, the effect will be significantly less impressive, and less useful. This is all before throwing horizontal movement into the works, too.

Rocket Jumping is a fantastic tool both for new players and experts, because while just about anyone can fire a rocket at their feet, a skilled player can use that impulse force to move around a level at extreme speed and use paths that are otherwise impossible to traverse. Skillful rocket jumping is an important factor in high-level play, but if you mess one up, your avatar won't just be standing there aimlessly - If you mess up a skill combo in Street Fighter you might just ineffectually punch the air in front of you, opening yourself up to be attacked. In Street Fighter, the combo is a sequence of buttons that otherwise have their own actions, whereas in Quake, your input combo is just to use those actions together to make something beautiful.

For this reason I like the idea of binding all actions to simple inputs, and rather than binding complex actions to their own inputs, just designing them to be a combination of those existing actions. Allowing player success in performing some action to be within a range, rather than just win/fail is pretty important across many aspects of game design, but that's a story for another time.

PS: If you want to see what that rocket jump tutorial looks like when it's done by a more skilled player, check this out:

I'm much worse than this.