Platforming game tutorial?

[PrinceOfBrains]

So I've finally been able to get back into SGDK2 after some time away for finals and such, and a friend of mine and I want to get into making our own simple games. We've battled our way through the tutorials, and we're having a good time, but we need a little further assistance.

The first one we wanna make is a simple, single-screen, Super Meat Boy/Bounty Bob Strikes Again kind of platform/puzzle game. Real simple stuff; a lot of jumping and picking up keys and simple enemies and such. And I'll be the first to admit it, we're both...kinda stupid. Does anyone have a good sample game or a tutorial or anything for this kind of thing? I'm the kind of guy who learns better by reading examples than by doing, to be honest, and I've been sitting here for a few hours trying futilely to get started.

I feel bad for asking; I'm not trying to get anyone else to do my work here for me or anything, I just find myself a little overwhelmed by SGDK's options and I'm just looking for a better jumping-off point. Just some examples for simple player movement and platform behavior, maybe some better ideas on how to actually make levels (as I've just spent a few hours on trying to do one example map, and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong!) would be forever appreciated.

Thanks in advance, and sorry again for being such a dumb noob.  :nerd:

[bluemonkmn]

It sounds like you would be a good candidate to take part in a project I'm in the process of starting, as you may have seen in another thread. Whether you want to participate in contributing to the actual game itself, or just use it as an example of how to make a platformer with SGDK2, you should take a look at iotaBuildIt. You can see the whole project idea and participation guidelines (still under development) at http://iotabuildit.sf.net. If you just want the SGDK2 file to see how it works without downloading the other software to submit modifications, you can get it directly from http://hg.code.sf.net/p/iotabuildit/code/raw-file/408d42e6cd90/SGDK2/iotaBuildIt.sgdk2 (download the target of that link as a file).

Holy cow. In the process of getting that link I discovered a totally new way for people to play the game without all the hassle of having to make a hosting request -- you can play the game directly from source control with a link like http://hg.code.sf.net/u/bluemonkmn/myiota/raw-file/bd99939d2275/HTML/iotaBuildIt.html! Thanks for leading me into that!

[v6v]

File > New Project >SGDK2 Sample Project

Alternatively...

The best part about SGDK2 is that you can simply import sprites, without making them yourself (I had done this for a year also)

I believe the platforming example I had used when I just started SGDK2 was the old:

http://gamedev.enigmadream.com/index.php?topic=1139.0 Credit to Jam0864, although I do believe that he's no longer with us.

It's a platformer sample with stickmen. I usually imported the sprite and had customized it to my needs.

Another project, that's not as developed as IotaBuildit, is a platformer sample that I had made myself, but it's a little more complex.
http://paradigm.heliohost.org/SGDK2/GuyWithTheHand.zip
It has the default Meatboy behaviors, spikes kill, get to a goal to next level, one hit enemy kills, infinite lives, switches that control certain timed events, etc.


Oddly enough, the maps should be pretty much drag and drop in the editor. Layers use Zposition to determine which layer is infront of another. Make sure to set your tilesizes in your tileset to the graphic sizes in the graphics sheet. I can't help much with that.. SGDK1 was the program where I had learned how to devv with maps.

So many samples sitting on my computer unfinished. One for every genre of platformer.

If you don't have a specific indie-project in mind, I would highly recommend moving towards IotaBuildIt. It will help to understand the basic mechanics of devving a platformer game.

[PrinceOfBrains]

I just wanted to drop in and say thanks to both of you guys for the help; iotaBuildIt looks fascinating in a Little Big Planet-kind of way, and the other platformer tutorial should help quite a bit! As soon as I get the chance to explore them, I'll be sure to let you know if something else comes up. Thanks again, really!