What have I been trying to achieve with my platformer game?

I've been trying to learn the basics of Gdevelop including how to create sprites with animations and how to add behaviour to a game world. My goal has been to get the game to a state were it can be tested meaning it has a goal for the player and some interesting choices to make.

What's something I learned during its development?

A lot of work goes into making a basic thing happen in a video game. Moving forward I'm going to start work early so I can keep up with my goals each week and I'm going to focus on the basics. Hopefully as I get better at basic tasks like creating sprites and adding game logic I can do these tasks faster. Then I can hopefully focus more on the gameplay rather than the mechanics of setting up a game.

What has inspired me in my readings?

One of the biggest concepts that stuck with me was Johan Huizinga's concept of the 'Magic Circle' as referenced in Game Design Workshop chapters 2 and 3. The magic circle is the place that people agree to go to when they engage in a game (Fullerton). The part of this concept that was striking to me was the need for an invitation into this circle. Normally when you play a game like a card game the invitation is literal, someone asks you if you'd like to play the game, if you accept, you sit down and play the game according to the rules. In a video game the invitation is more metaphorical, the title screen is often considered to be the 'invitation' to the game. This immediately made sense to me as the title screen has often been make or break for me being sucked into a game.

This screenshot is a great example. Its the title screen of OpenTTD a transport management game were you build trains, ship, trucks and planes to fulfil the transport needs of the various cities in the game. I love title screens like this one, it fills me with inspiration everytime I open the game. I think wow, look at all those train lines and how massive that city has become. It makes me excited to jump in and try to make a massive train network just like it.

How can I apply this to my games?

Now that I'm getting a firm grasp on the basics, I'm going to make it my mission to apply this concept to my games. In the next couple of uni tutorials I'm going to try and figure out how I can add my own title screens to games. I'm going to think about how I can make those screens an interesting and exciting invite to play my games.

References:

This week I have progressed from learning and into execution.

Focusing on my movement, enemies, weapons, and map design.

I had a basic game of the player running around and jumping on enemies.

However, I wanted a new method of defeating them, so I came up with the idea of implementing a new weapon to defeat enemies, adding an extra layer to the game. I ended up sticking with a boomerang as a weapon, which would take out the enemies. So I started making weapon designs, and ended up with this as my boomerang.

After a few attempts at designing my boomerang, I decided to stick with the more pixelated design and chose the colour blue as to easily identify the weapon.

During week 3 of the workshop we conducted Playtesting which I grabbed a friend and got them to play my basic game without saying too much. This allowed them to learn the game all on their own, and allowed me to identify the learnability of the game. I realised that it wasn't immediately obvious for them that they had to jump on the enemies heads, and to make it more obvious I should have the player jump down onto a platform which would kill an enemy at the beginning. This would therefore encourage them to do it more often.

I was also asking about my boomerang idea for the game, which they stated the design was very cool, and had the idea of making the player have to pick up the weapon again when it hit the enemy as to make it more realistic.

This week I’ve continued to develop my platformer game to get it to a state where it can be play tested. It won’t be anything impressive, but it will teach me how to make a basic game using Gdevelop 5.

What have I been trying to achieve?

I’ve just been trying to understand the basics at this stage like how to animate things, set up events that trigger etc. To achieve this I’ve put together a basic world that the character can jump around in and I’ve been adding and tweaking things simply to learn how they work. For example, I strayed from the tutorial and tweaked the gravity value that controls jumping. I was able to make the character jump higher if the player holds the jump button down. I decided to keep this because I’ve enjoyed the mechanic in games I’ve played before.

What did I learn from this?

I re-learnt from back in the day when I used to mod Skyrim, that game development can be very time consuming. Chapter 10 of Game Design Workshop talks about development phases and how it is important to focus on the feature you are currently working on, get it completed, and don't worry about fixing every bug or problem that you find along the way (Fullerton). This was a mistake that I made as a modder as I never finished a project because I was using too much time making my creations look good instead of finishing the basic functionality that I was working on. Following the advice of the text book I’ve been making a low fidelity game but one that has interesting things to do in it. I've focused on making the game playable instead of fixing every movement bug or fleshing out all the animations. Its much more of a game than the Skyrim mod that looked pretty but didn’t do anything.

I also noted that changing things, like the jumping mechanics, can have wide ranging consequences in a complex system like a video game. I can see what Chapter 5 of Game Workshop meant when they were talking about game systems and how changing them can have cascading consequences (Fullerton). Changing how high my character could jump completely changed the game world as I had to make the platforms higher, so they remained challenging to reach. This resulted in my game world being 3 times higher than it was originally.

My next game should come together faster now I know the basics and what to focus my effort on. In my next post I’ll be talking about what I learnt from testing this game.

References:

Basic actions and jumping of characters & settings for smoothing the camera

Jesse Schell said that the basic elements of a game are made up of technology, mechanics, aesthetics, and story.

But before that, I think the key to driving the development of these four elements is the character controlled by the player. As the most important tool to drive the development of the game plot, the character is the most basic and indispensable element of the game, and it also determines the first feeling of the player. , so the basic move settings of the characters are very important

Actions and jumping of characters

As the most important tool to drive the development of the game plot, the characters controlled by the player are the most basic and indispensable elements of the game.

As the most important tool to drive the development of the game plot, the characters controlled by the player are the most basic and indispensable elements of the game.

The adjustment of character movement and jumping is intuitive, because the core of platform jumping games is jumping. A good jumping feeling will enhance the player's mobile experience foundation, thereby giving the player a good sense of character movement and enabling the player to continue the game.

(Personally, if I had a bad first impression of the game's movement and jumping, like wrong inertia affecting walking, or gravity affecting jumping, I would immediately consider the game a bad game. Although my views are extreme, as a game producer, this is a standard I set for myself. After all, in the future game development process, there may be some toxic players, some of whom will have more extreme views. But some of these points are very accurate reminders of these inadequacies.)

I went and checked out some developer interviews with "Celeste", they spent a lot of time designing and changing the game feel.

This is the parameter I adjusted for my character.

Settings for Smooth Camera

In order to keep my camera from moving out of the background, I set 4 red lines in the direction of the camera up, down, left, and right, and let the camera identify where the boundaries are, to prevent the camera from letting the player see the scene outside the background.

The principle of this function is somewhat similar to the function of limiting the range in the cinematic camera in Unity (although the camera effect in Unity is much better than what it achieves)

In addition, for the adjustment of the smoothness of the camera, I want the movement speed of the Y-axis to be less than the movement speed of the X-axis, resulting in a movement mode that resembles a Bezier curve.

Double Jump

In my previous Elevator idea, I mentioned "what abilities will the protagonist get after getting the props." So I set the rule that 'the protagonist must get the "shoe" props to perform the double jump'.

My friend Tan, Jiaxi, the core gameplay of the demo of his game Ethical Questions is a game based on the protagonist's double jump ability to avoid various traps. The double jump in my game is based on the double jump function in his game.

But in fact, when we tried to implement this function, there were many strange problems/situations.（wtf Gdevelop）

The character cannot jump twice after getting the shoes;

Or the character can jump twice before getting the shoes;

Or after the character gets the shoes, he can jump indefinitely (the character can keep going up without releasing the space bar)

In the end, when the program determines whether the character performs the second jump, we add an "Active” command to it to limit the character's command for the second jump. In the end, we successfully achieved the effect of 'you can double jump after getting the item'.

The specific effect is as follows (since GIF only supports 10MB files, the jumping picture before eating shoes cannot be recorded):

Points to note:

The double-jump mechanism is actually a "destruction" of the original core mechanism for platform jumping games that can only achieve simple effects. For me personally, I think this "destroyed" situation has given birth to a new core gameplay in this game. We should design a new level in the original map after the character gets the double jump.

Personally, I think that because the similar gameplay from beginning to end will make players feel fatigued, although it is a challenge for designers, it is worth it. I then have to think about when the game progresses to allow the protagonist to get the double jump function.

For a platform jumping game that can only achieve simple effects, the double jump is actually a "destruction" of the original core mechanism, but I don't dislike this design of the game. Personally, I think that players will be fatigued because of the similar gameplay from start to finish, which is a challenge for game designers to design levels and gameplay. I then have to think about when the game progresses to allow the protagonist to get the double jump function.

CheckPoint

For jumping platform games, the "Save Point" function is a very important function, which can reduce the player's error tolerance and improve the fluency of the game narrative in disguise.

The specific effects are as follows:

Ladder & Player Interaction

The effect is indeed done, but the layer relationship of my picture doesn't seem right.

The solution to the layer problem:

Because the tutorial didn't talk about this related knowledge, so I went to youtube to find some related tutorials.

Then I successfully solved the problem.

Move the platform horizontally/vertically

A classic design element that must exist in platform jumping games.

The specific effects are as follows:

Invisible Block

This is a feature I stumbled upon to try, inspired by the invisible bridge in the snowy mountains in "Elder Ring".

As a video editor who has been working for 4-5 years, the "Opacity" feature is all too familiar to me.

So I imagined that if the opacity of the block was set to 0, would they still be able to complete the "platform" function？

After experimenting, I succeeded.

The specific effects are as follows:

*I wrote a follow-up to the new mechanic that further spawns this effect in the next post.

Hidden trap door

This is one of the most basic elements of CMS-style map level design (箱庭ゲーム), which blocks the player's original path and makes them have to open up a new path to achieve the purpose of exploration.

The design idea here is inspired by the process by which pitcher plants hunt insects.

Placing an item that is a "reward" for the player, when they go in and pick up the item, blocks the original path, so the player is forced to do a new exploration.

The logic of the function implementation:

The red area is a reward item that attracts players to come over.

The blue area is the trigger point that makes the door stop moving.

The green area is the trigger point that triggers the door to close after the player walks into this area.

The specific effects are as follows (version without gold coins):

character death effect

In the workshop, I saw a demo of a person's game. When the character dies, there will be a death effect, which looks good, so I went to Youtube to find a way to achieve it.

The implementation logic of this effect is very simple, first design a particle emitter for the character when it dies, and then trigger it when the character decides to die.

The specific effects are as follows:

Reference

Jesse Schell. (2018). The Art of Game Design. A book of Lenses, Thrid Edition. Publishing house of electronics industry.

Development Post Over the last week I worked on creating a 2D platformer game, although these type of games are not my favourites I learnt a lot in G Develop.

I started by creating a character who could run and jump, with aliens on each platform that moved back and forth. It was important to think about the starting spawns of these aliens as well as the positioning of the platforms in order to make it challenging yet not too hard for players. I then added a UI with a score and a health bar on it, this gave the ‘pointless’ game some substance, with consequences and a goal. I used collision detection to lower the health when the player hit an enemy, however I quickly discovered that this was quite buggy. As you can see this caused the player’s health to continuously drop while in contact with an enemy, which wasn’t ideal at all!

But how could I fix this? I played around with lowering the amount that was taken away, but this left odd numbers in different scenarios. Finally I found a solution: that was in the form of timers. I could use timers to check when the last time a player had hit an enemy and only take health if it was within two seconds. 

This reminded me of classical platform games, where when you collide with an enemy, your sprite flashes, you take damage, and for a brief period you are invulnerable to damage.

I found timers to be the most important aspect in my game as with this I could improve on many of my features, stopping them from occurring too frequently. E.G colliding with an enemy would continously drop your health until you were no longer touching, and dropping bombs was no fun if you didnt have to wait 3 seconds before you could throw another.

I finally had a game now that was playable! It didn’t look great, it was obviously missing features, but the key concepts were there. It was a prototype! However, after playing it through a few times I quickly realised it wasn’t very engaging, but I couldn’t figure out why! You could, jump, run, kill enemies. What more did a prototype need!?  After a night of bedtime reading, points raised by Fullerton in her book ( Game Design Workshop : A Play Centric Approach to Creating Games ) finally pointed me towards an answer. The game had no dramatic elements to engage players into a meaningful experience. 

The theory of ‘flow’ really struck a chord with me, and I realised how important it was to challenge players, to find a balance between challenge and ability. My level was too easy. Once a player figured out how to beat one alien platform it was all the same. I needed to increase the difficulty of platforms and really make them concentrate and actively play the game. I managed to acheive this by adding an area towards the end where the platform blocks were small and required precise, well thought out jumps in order to avoid falling into the pit of slime below.

Hello and once again welcome to the development blog of my platformer in GDevelop. The last couple of weeks I have been putting a heavy focus on the development of the project into making a working prototype to allow others to playtest the game and give feedback. When playtesting the initial prototype I received quite valuable and just feedback from participants which helped me focus and mold my project into something more enjoyable and complete.

Feedback

1. The movement and collision felt to stiff and some objects were bigger than their image

2. Their was no clear instructions on what came out of the chest when opening it

3. Some jumping sections were to hard

4. Lack of puzzles and direction

Some of these suggestions I completely understood and worked on, others I didn't agree on but took the opportunity to expand of concepts to further improve.

Provided Fixes & Iteration

My main goal was to solve multiple problems with simple solutions. The first was to focus on Formal Elements which help make up a game, as described by Fullerton, such as Objectives. Currently, my game had minimal exploration and puzzles which I wanted to emphasis as part of the world. To fulfil this idea, I created a new puzzle that rewarded the character for exploring once they unlocked a previous ability. By doing this it allowed me to indicate to the player there was more objectives in the game and make the world seem more rewarding world. The reward that I implemented for completion of the puzzle was the ability for the character to double jump which they could only acquire after the learning to shoot the crystal.

Now, with that implemented I could further give the player more objectives, such as creating another area for the double jump to reach the exit.

Next, was to adjust the collision present within the games world to be more fluent and didn't feel like you were constantly bumping everything. The main issue from feedback and my own testing was the corner sprites and the spacing of platforms. Due to the corners having a base square hitbox I needed to adjust the hitbox to match the sprite to allow the player to predict jumps correctly. This was immediately remedied with custom hitboxes and made the world feel more pleasent to jump around in. The next issue was the worlds spacing, and as seen in the picture above if not placed correctly the character would hit the roof and feel bad to jump around in. Through playtesting and iterating on the design I was able to create a platforming section which felt fluid. This process was used throughout the world.

Finally, I added text based instructions which would show when the player would open a chest for the first time to help guide the user on what the unlock does and how to use it.

World Building

With the feedback out of the way I was able to work on making the world feel more alive and whole. Thanks to the texture pack that I downloaded, I was able to put in some houses, trees and other doodads to help make the world come alive. This is a before and after of an area:

Current Game Thoughts

With this further design to the world, I came to realize I was creating a game more focused on the Metroid side of the game and less of the Celeste aspect. So, I made a conscious decision to reduce the amount of Celeste aspects in the future and showcase that form of the game in Puzzle Rooms. So the pitch will have changed from "Celeste meets Metroid" to "Metroid meets Celeste", where there is a large interconnected world with Celeste styled puzzle rooms allowing the player to challenge themselves with the abilities unlocked.

That's it for this week, thank you for checking out my development blog, next week I will be finalizing development of my prototype and discussing my thoughts on the process and what I would do next time.

Sources

I am keep going to implemet 6 things I posted on week2. There is a list

1.Smooth the movement of the character.

2. Allow the player to move through key press inputs

3. Implement a start menu and result menu.

4. Implement BGM

5. Allows the player to step on the enemy to defeat it

6. Allow the player to earn points when they take coins

I've done 1,2,4 and 6. I forgot to write about part 1 and 2 on week2 post. I'll start these parts first.

I made running animation and jump animation in the game. As a result, Nya(character player control) looks like walking and jumping and it work smoothly. On the second part, I implemented the key input. So, when the player press D or right arrow button, Nya moves to right, the player press A and left arrow button, Nya moves to left and the player press W or above arrow key, Nya jumps.

So, I start to implement 5 part. Firstly, I made player hit box. This hit box is formed rectangle and this is following Nya when Nya moves. This is for collision detection against enemy and juding how player collide with enemy. So, when this hit box collide with enemy and if the lowest y axis of this hit box is higher than the hightest y axis of the enemy, the enemy is deleted. If the conditions are not met, the game is over. That is what I've done on part 5.

About part 3, I used move scene function. So, when player arrive the goal, congratulation scene is appeared. Player can see score in this scene. To use in this scene, I set global variable to share score. So, when player done game, scene get globale variable called score and get value of score.

If player lose, lose scene is appeared.

To add more fun staff, I add some of clouds have collision detection. From below screen shot, when player collides with the could is in the middle, the game is over.

In this time, I did playtest with my friend. There is only a few minutes to do, so I got small feedback from him.

1, the point to change the direction of enemy is visibale, so he said it should be changed to invisible.

2, the game is really hard to achive goal

3,Nya is really cute

This game cocept is extremely hard to clear. So I do not care about feedback2. For the feedback1, I agreed with that, so I tried to implemente it. I found hide function and I set when the game scene is started, the hide function does start working. Therefore, the point is invisible, when the game start.

Hi there! This weeks blog post is about my platformer game and how it’s development is going.

Development posts

·         What have you been trying to achieve in GDevelop?

My aim with developing this platformer is to get a basic understanding of how the GDevelop system works while creating an enjoyable game. My game is quite basic and uses many of the stock attributes of the GDevelop platformer template. I have experimented with a degree of tools to make my game unique. My goal with this game is to provide a one level, fast paced game that is decently challenging.

·         What was something you learned?

I have learnt how to navigate the GDevelop application and have experimented with a variety of tools inside the software. I have created my own sprites with the art tools and assigned them unique interactions. Also I have noted that GDevelop is a lot more complicated than I previously had though it to be after discovering more of the software.

·         Showcasing design ideas and concepts from/inspired by readings

In the playtesting section of the readings covers inspiration and how playtesting can help the developer approach the game from another perspective. In the case of my platformer, I tested it at each iteration. I would take notes and come up with ideas on how to better the development. By analysing my game from a players perspective I was able to gain inspiration and come up with applicable changes. Doing this will help me in later exercises and has given me a good foundation to base my play testing and development off.

·         Thoughts on readings and how they apply to what you’ve been making