I didn't want to make it sound critical, but just voice my surprise at what is given to begin with
Well, then , let me see if I can explain, because I think there are good reasons behind most of those decisions:
It seems strange to me that the sample project is a platformer but the tutorial is a flying triangle game.
The tutorial project is much simpler than the sample project because it's designed around the idea of creating a game from scratch rather than creating a typical game. The intention is to get familiar with all the aspects of SGDK2, not to create a game the way you normally would create a game (if you want to do that, see the tutorial about importing sprites). If I were to create a tutorial that designs a platformer from scratch, it would be pages longer than this tutorial, which is already hard to follow. If what you really want to do is create a platformer, I suggest looking at the sample game, now that you have a basic understanding of all the concepts in SGDK2 from going through the triangle game tutorial.
Or that it has a rotating sprite wizard but not a left-right sprite wizard... or even instructions to make a left-right sprite.
The only reason the rotating sprite wizard exists is because it's very hard to create 360 perfectly rotated states manually. If all you want is a left-right sprite, you can easily import one of those and modify it to your liking, deleting the rules you don't care about. But a rotating sprite can be based on 360 states, 180 states, 72 states, 36 states... whatever... I didn't want to create separate templates for all those. I'm just trying address the most critical usability issues first, and having to manually create rotating sprites would be a serious usability problem without this wizard (more so than left-right sprites at least).
I figured that would be the main focus of the Kit and judging by what I see of sgdk1 projects, its what the thing was used for...
Yes, I too believe that left-right sprites will be the most common type of sprite in SGDK2. That's why most of the available sprite templates are for left-right type sprites.
I suppose what it boils down to is, I just want to make a normal game, you know? I know how to make walls and pick-up items, but I don't know how to make a character that runs on the ground and jumps. As a newcomer, I would like to know.
You were on the right track by importing a player sprite. You just need to make a few adjustments after you import the sprite (and I need to document them):
1) Either add a Ladder
tile category to your project, or disable all rules that refer to the Ladder tile category in the Player sprite's rules.
2) Either add a Platform
sprite category to your project or disable all rules that refer to Platrofm sprite category in the Player sprite's rules.
3) Adjust the graphics associated with the player sprite if you want it to look different.
Hopefully the error messages that you get when you try to run or build the project guide you in the right direction at least. But as I said, I do need to document that part better. Durnurd has suggested a feature that allows more thorough documentation of sprite templates so that people importing them know how to use them better, and I agree. Anyway, I hope this helps and is enough to get you moving along on your project.
