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Author Topic: my opinion about Platform2d  (Read 1300 times)

ch1ky3n

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my opinion about Platform2d
« on: May 07, 2020, 10:47:29 PM »
There is a paradigm in new playmaker's users or people who start to learn to make games that platformer genre is the easiest way to learn to make games (at least in my communities). Somehow, I feel Platformer is actually one of the hardest genres.

Maybe because people think of Super Mario as the most primitive game and set it as a bar for a new dev. I believe, to recreate Super Mario itself with the right feels is damn hard!

so I think, new dev should avoid platformers as their first project, instead, they should be introduced to better and easier alternatives.

What kind of project do you guys recommend to begin with? (For People who start at playmaker)

my thoughts:
1. Rock Paper Scissors
2. Nintendo Duck Hunts (With Mouse)
3. Quiz Games (Learns GUI and Arrays)
4. Pong
5. Mario and Donkey Kong Style (Platformer Introduction)

What do you guys think?


djaydino

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Re: my opinion about Platform2d
« Reply #1 on: June 12, 2020, 05:39:02 PM »
Hi.
Rock Paper Scissors :
I think is good to learn some logic.

Nintendo Duck Hunts (With Mouse) :
Is also good for starter

Quiz Games :
Not so good for starters ( to make a decent quiz game you would need some xml knowledge to place and get all your questions and answers)

Pong :
The basic setup is not hard.
But if you want your paddle to add some additional physics (like the moment you ball hit your paddle and you move to left/right to change direction of the ball)
When i started with programming (a year before i met Playmaker)
i started off with this as i thought it would be easy, it almost made me quit programming)

Mario and Donkey Kong Style (Platformer Introduction) :
This might not be the best for absolute beginners, but should be fairly early being able to preferably 2D.
But best to follow some 2D platformer tutorials

Flappy bird clone is also ok to begin with

But its still best to begin with following several tutorials.

One of the mistakes i mostly notice is that new people start immediately with a project to make a full game (whatever type it may be)

Thore

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Re: my opinion about Platform2d
« Reply #2 on: June 13, 2020, 05:46:41 AM »
Generally, the basic setup is often somewhat easy. But making it good is difficult.

  • mechanics that need to "feel right". Lots of tuning of values, picking the right methods, lerping and smoothing at the right places etc, timers everywhere.
  • interconnected mechanics. Fun with racing conditions, requires decent game architecture.
  • turn-based systems more complex than "taking turns" to do one thing. Gets complicated quickly when you need to manage queues and lists, and find game objects to act on all the time.
  • multiplayer. Couch co-opt on one screen is maybe manageable, but anything above that requires a solid coder (the whole game needs to be build differently, with server checks and back-end, and security issues).
  • AI. Depends of course, but anything but simple pathfinding or typical platformer AI will be difficult.
  • semi-complex physics interactions. I wasted many hours just because the hinge joints  behaved eccentrically.
  • non-trivial procedural systems (e.g. roguelikes). Swapping out random elements is the easy part.
  • decent graphics, is a deep rabbit hole with render pipelines & shaders. It's only easy when you stick to exactly the default stuff built into the pipeline and even then, only half will work. I still don't know why deferred fog doesn't work in my current setup.
  • Actually completing, and shipping the game. That's not only because the final 20% take so much time with seemingly little progress, but also because a full game needs everything else, like the game architecture to move to scenes, UIs with options, load/save, intro screens, etc.

Any game without any of these will be somewhat easy to make. You can make a platformer like this in a day. But it feels like one of those Unity demo projects and plays badly.