Recently I posted an article called How To Make A Platformer FEEL Good. In it, I displayed several GIFs where the grass and hanging vines would move a bit when the character interacted with them. Several people asked me if I made a ton of animations to make that happen or if I was doing some form of programming magic. It was the former. I had a bunch of four-frame animations playing. However, that is by no means necessary. In this article, I’d like to show off one way to achieve a particular procedural animation effect without the need for any sprite animations.
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Programming
Solo Game Jam #1
12:09 AM
A few months ago I started doing ‘Solo Game Jams’ during late night tweeting sprees. I realized that my follower count was very proportionate to the number of GIFs that I was tweeting so I came up with a fun way to experiment with ideas and half a constant stream of content.
Theme
Tonight is one of those nights. The theme is: OBSCURE SPORTS. I had several ideas today after looking into Jan Willem ‘JW’ Nijman’s tennis game, TENNNES. For those of you who don’t know, JW is one half of the dutch independent studio, Vlambeer.
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DevLog: Creating a Platformer Pt.5
DAY 8
Just a disclaimer here, ‘week one’ of development is complete. However, what you see within this devlog (up until now) is NOT the current progress that has been made on this project. I am purposely working around any content that contains spoilers or reveals much about the game. The game is scheduled to be announced next month. From there I will be more open about development.
Tonight I’m going to talk about some other simple things that I added throughout the days. These features aren’t something that you may need during week one of development, but I want to get it out of the way and share as much as possible prior to announcement.
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DevLog: Creating a Platformer Pt.4
DAY 7 (Cont.)
Last night I talked about with() and ‘other’ and how you can use them to approach your code structure in a new way and hopefully, a simpler way. I also started to use these techniques to start tackling moving platforms.
I added both horizontal moving platforms and sub-pixel movement to the platforms last night. Again, to add sub-pixel movement, I collect the rounded sub-pixel numbers and add them to the movement calculations when they exceed a whole number.
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DevLog: Creating a Platformer Pt.3
DAY 7
It had been roughly a week since I’ve had any public updates on this project. I had a busy Halloween weekend and I was also wrapping up some contract work. On top of that, I have been poking at some pixel art. I’d really like to have the freedom to create my own games, both technically AND visually. If I decide to practice pixel art more regularly, I’ll start a log about that too.
ANYWAY, changes since the last post:
1) I decided that I would be needing jump through platforms. There are collision objects that are only collide-able when you fall on top of them from above. Basically, you can jump up through them, then fall back down to land on them.
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Understanding Collision Basics Pt.2
Yesterday I uploaded PART 1 of ‘Understanding Collision Basics’. In it, I explained how to handle simple collision with flat surfaces and slopes by iterating through single pixel translations.
Sub-Pixel Movement
As a few of you had mentioned, this approach does not support sub-pixel movement. What I mean by sub-pixel movement is that an object with a speed of 5.0, an object with a speed of 5.1, and an object with a speed of 5.9 will all appear to move at the same speed. Depending on the game you are making this may be ok, but I’d like to show you how to remove that crutch.
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DevLog: Creating a Platformer Pt.2
DAY 1 (Cont.)
I’ve had quite a bit of positive feedback in response to this devlog! I’m super happy about that and would love to post updates ‘somewhat’ daily. I say ‘somewhat’ because I am bound to miss a day here and there, BUT I’d love to make this a regular thing!
I greatly appreciate the shares, retweets, likes, etc!
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DevLog: Creating a Platformer Pt.1
DAY 1
I would like to work on a project, publicly. I think it would be cool to show off what goes through my mind as I am both programming and designing the “feel” and mechanics that go into a fast-paced, action platformer.
As usual, I am going to be using Game Maker Studio for this project. When creating a new project file, my first steps are to get some placeholder art into the build, asap. I want to be able to test code as it is completed so I quickly make a standard 16×16 pixel block, two 45-degree angle slopes, and a bounding box for the player.
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Understanding Collision Basics Pt.1
I have been asked time and time again to start doing video tutorials for Game Maker Studio and programming concepts in general. I’m going to start by taking requests for blog posts, and if interest continues, I’ll invest some time into a video series!
Send Me Ideas!
Email me -> zbell91@comcast.net
Ask publicly -> http://ask.fm/ZackBellGames
Collision Basics
I get this question almost every day, so it’s about time that I talk about it. How do I implement slopes of different angles and other more advanced collision features?
Continue reading “Understanding Collision Basics Pt.1”
