Working on a platformer, and I was about to implement lives... but then I realized, maybe adding lives there is probably going to be pointless, thanks to the save system (if you run out of lives at worst you'd just restart the level instead of returning to the last checkpoint - more likely than it'd seem since lives are not saved so you always would start with 3 lives).

Right now I didn't implement them so there are infinite "lives" (essentially until you give up). If you lose a life (either by getting hit three times, getting crushed or falling into a bottomless pit), you return to the last checkpoint (or to the start of the level if you didn't touch any). This is an old-school platformer (4th-gen styled) so mechanics are pretty much borrowed from that era.

So my question here is: are there any better ideas than using lives? (or a better way to implement them) Please, only ideas that can be easy to implement, if it's something that could take a lot of effort I will most likely not even consider it. I'm a lazy programmer after all =P

(sorry for bold font, wanted to make the question stand out clearly just in case)

Dying is not expected to be frequent here though, if you die often in a given place it means you need to improve your skills until you get through it. Early levels are going to be pretty easy, although I can imagine the last levels to be as punishing as this bastard (although I'll avoid that nearly impossible jump at the end - actually that level from the video ended up getting updated to make those jumps easier).

Also if you have 20 rooms between checkpoints there's an issue, that's about as long as a (short) level...

It really depends on what your game expects to gain from lives - why have them at all?

Honestly? Mainly a legacy carried from practically almost all platformers from that era. The main thing being, those platformers weren't able to save progress either, so game over had some meaning after all.

One that comes to mind from that time that didn't use lives was Chaotix, which removed lives because of its save system... but it's in a completely different situation since it had no checkpoints either (you always started at the beginning of a level) and it also selected a level "randomly" (OK, not randomly, but unless you had a specific item or you used frame stepping in an emulator the best you could do is hope it landed on the level you wanted to try next).

Except for a 'hardcore' purpose, the only point I see is feeding coins into a machine. If you have your checkpoints decently close together, there really is no need for lives, unless there is some other game-related reason why there they should be included in the game.

Maybe the fact that in the current design checkpoints aren't saved, only the last level, though I suppose you would argue the checkpoint should be saved (probably just the X,Y coordinates would do), though then there's another question: what should the game do if the player decides to resume gameplay on a previous level and not the last one that was played? Savegames double as a level select for the played levels too.

Or am I mistaking "lives" for "health" here? In the video you linked, by 'lives' do you mean the three hearts, or do you mean respawns when you run out of hearts? I'm assuming you mean the latter.

The latter, your assumption is right.

My opinion is the tradition lives system is obsolete. It was unbelievably frustrating when you were on the final world and you lost your last life and were forced to start the whole game over.

I think that's pretty much false for every platformer with a save system. The problem is where you're allowed to save, e.g. some let you save every level (or even every checkpoint), some let you save only at some key point areas (e.g. Super Mario World only let you save after beating an important section like a castle or a switch palace).

This is probably my issue, saving every level seems spaced enough, but levels are long enough that being forced to restart them every time you lose a life could be annoying so checkpoints should go in place, but then it doesn't make sense unless I impose a limit to the checkpoints (which would mean adding lives) or changing the save system so it saved every checkpoint instead (which could be seen as being too often, though then again many people also demand the ability to quicksave anywhere with no exception).

Also, since the player can select which level to go to when starting a game in a saveslot, there's the issue of what to do with the checkpoint if it's meant to be saved - of course it could be dropped if the player chooses a different level, but should the game assume the player just wants to go to the checkpoint if he chooses the same level (and force the player go select "restart" to restart the level from the beginning in the pause menu if that wasn't what he wanted to do) or should the game explicitly prompt about it instead?

p.s. The game charged money to buy lives as well. A bit of a money grab, but I bet if you had a great game you could pull that off.

Oh yeah, I know what's this game, the author even posted in Gamasutra about this. He had also posted some graphs indicating when players gave up. Apparently most people got stuck in a specific area of the second level at some point...

How about time? Make the player have a time to complete the things he/she is supposed to do, thus having lose time in both doing the action and 'dying'. Making it so the time is plentiful if you don't make mistakes, should also allow for another way to tweak the challenge. (Have less time in some situations).
If time runs out, the level would fail.

This is probably the most flexible of these I'm writing about. X time before a sandstorm arrives in a desert. X time before you freeze to death at a glacier etc.

Oi, I hate time limits for stuff that could be done without it >_< And even then, it still doesn't solve the problem at hand, i.e. what happens when the player already failed, not how you can fail (which is pretty clear: get hit too much, fall into a pit or get crushed).

Or you could think of mentality of the character. Failing could make him a little bit more mad. Success make him a tad more sane. This, like time, could work on a game-wide scale. Probably works best if the game is about the character him/herself.

Her.

There really isn't much being shown in terms of storyline except for the occasional cutscene between some of the levels (mainly area transitions), so I doubt that's an option anyway. Besides I don't want to cause interface screw or something like that, and I'd need to add new graphics, etc. Though you're tempting me to make the character look angry when idle if you fail too much at some point XD (e.g. fail three times in a row without getting to the next checkpoint and her idle position will look like she's upset - game follows as usual however)

So, what I'm thinking right now that could be done is just store the level and the last checkpoint. If you want to go back to the beginning of the level just choose "restart" from the pause menu. If you go to a different level the checkpoint is reset. Any comments on this?

PS: c'mon, I had to copy this to gedit and then paste it back because the post editor kept screwing up miserably (to the point that it eventually would add newlines always at the beginning of the post when I pressed Enter o_O).