EPTI noticed that we seem to have quite a number of - mostly amateur - game designers and developers here, so I thought "why not go ahead and introduce myself" as I'm working on a free retro platformer in my free time as well. The game I'm working on is called "The Art of Dying" and it's made with a software called "Adventure Game Studio" that I've been using and abusing for non-adventure game for ten years now. This is a solo project, meaning I'm programming the entire thing, I'm drawing all the art and animation and design the game. The music in the video is used with permission and is by the amazing Tom Woxom - found on the equally wonderful freemusicarchive.org!
The way I want to present the game is with short video segments: each one focuses on one particular aspect of the game. This first installment talks about the most important game play mechanic in any platformer: movement! Please take a look:
In the video I demonstrate the way I implemented movement, acceleration/deceleration on different surfaces (solid and slippery), jumping, double-jumping and ducking.
Let me expand a little on two of the points made in the video:
- Featuring smooth movement (with acceleration and deceleration) as opposed to hard fixed-pixel movement is very important. The former gives a much more modern feel to your game, the latter is more precise and exact. I went for very subtle smooth movement and put a lot of effort into finding 'correct' values so that you would just barely notice that there is smooth movement in the game but still keep the controls as tight as possible.
- Jump systems are a second, fundamentally important aspect of platformers. There are several different styles that you can follow: There's the simple way. You hit the jump button and it results in the same exact jump every time no matter what. Then there's the Mario way: the jump starts when you push the jump button and gets an upward boost for a limited amount of time if you hold the jump button. That gives the gameplay much more complexity as you can now have jumps that players need to be careful not to overshoot (down-facing spikes over gaps anyone?) and you need to master the regulation of the jump. And then there's the double-jump system that I went for. It's like the first-mentioned primitive jumping system except that you can, well, double-jump. I went for this latter approach because it allows the player to regulate the jumps and makes the gameplay more complex and, at the same time, it looks really cool to double-jump all over the place. Don't ever underestimate how important it is for core gameplay mechanics to just be straight-up dumb fun (and complete unrealistic from a physics point of view)!
I will be releasing a second video very shortly from now, assuming this blog series catches a bit of interest, which will focus on the various attacks in the game! Please let me know what you think of my project, the ideas I talked about in the video and in this post and ask any questions you might have!
Cheers,
NihiL
Would enjoy seeing more of these. What tools did you use to make all this stuff?
I've rarely ever had such a love-hate relationship with a game as I had with Volgarr. And I'm not talking about difficulty - it's just that the length of the game is so short (even for that indie ~20 dollar/~14 euro price tag), there's so little replay value and those boss fights - urgh, super slow and uninspired in my opinion. Yet it's so well-liked by pretty much everybody - because it somehow still manages to be a good game. I don't know. I haven't quite made my mind up about it I guess.
