What makes a good 2d platformer?

how can you make a game feel great why does This Magnificent Masterpiece feel so good while our game feels just okay well we suspect that the character controls might be responsible so we did our research and found 11 tips and tricks to enhance them and get our game in shape the obvious first the jump right now looks like it's set on the moon we could tweak the gravity settings but it's simpler to adjust the jump height and the time it takes to reach the jumps Apex we choose these values for now time for a practical test since it's difficult to replicate the exact feeling of playing the game firsthand we've set up a basic course we ran it five times for each Improvement and recorded the average completion time it's not a perfect comparison but improving your game's feel should enable the player to control the character a lot better and therefore getting faster times the average time before was 1 minute and 13 seconds with the new Jump settings we got 27 seconds faster by the way do you know what's not cool cheating unless it's by Design and prevents these kinds of behaviors and that's where this guy comes into play Imagine you need to make a long jump you do not want to jump from here but it's close to the edge as possible however as soon as you're a pixel too late you fall die and probably smash your TV to address this we allow the player to jump a few milliseconds after they've left the platform with this coyote time implemented we improve the average time once more even though just a little bit now that we broke the laws of physics we want to embrace them with the next Improvement acceleration and deceleration rather than having the character instantly reach full speed or come to an abrupt stop we've introduced a brief period for both acceleration and deceleration this value is it for now we use different acceleration and deceleration values on the ground and in the air it feels more natural when the acceleration in the the air is lower running through our small level our times got a little slower but that makes sense if you consider that we reduced the acceleration from an infinite to an actual number another tip that increases the feeling is allowing the player to control the height of the jumps we do this by considering how long the player presses the jump button by the way if you want to know more about the coding we link some YouTube videos down below there are such great ones on this platform already in case you need help don't hesitate to ask us in the comments oh look a new high score enough of these lame realistic physics we will bend them once more turning feels way too slow so we use a fake acceleration boost in this case also if we land on ground we decelerate the player just a little bit to better stick to small platforms and again a small Improvement these guys will hate us even more but having separate gravity values for the rise and the fall of a jump allows us to tweaked the feeling of a jump even more we used just a slightly faster fall and voila a new best time now that we increased the fall speed we encountered a new issue the character Falls too quickly so fast that it's not possible for the human brain to keep up that's why we implemented a limit to the fall speed we decided to run with this for now not to our surprise the times got a little slower we reduced the fall speed but it's the feeling we need and got doing a small recap with the six improvements we made so far our goal isn't to achieve hyper realistic character movement but rather to create an illusion of realism for the player and we want to be as generous as possible and forgive our players all the minor mistakes they make can you think of any more situation where it's frustrating to be real and where the feeling would improve if we make the game cheat for our players the next next tip is another example of that consider this situation where the player wants to jump but he collides with the ceiling even though he expects the character to make it in such cases we check if the player could jump higher if we move just a little bit to the right or to the left this also applies to horizontal movements The Edge dodging comes in handy at this section of the course so we improve the time once again what happens if the player presses the jump button at this very moment well this similar to the coyote time but in Reverse we allow the player to press the jump button a little too early and do the jump once the character touches the ground and we improve the time again we are quite happy with how the game feels to play but there's one aspect that is bugging us when you jump it's difficult to influence where you land it feels like your fate is sealed at the moment you jump of course you you can navigate the player a bit but that's limited due to the lower acceleration in the air we decided on earlier simply increasing the acceleration feels too unrealistic one possible solution for this is to give the player a certain boost that intensifies the closer he gets to the jumps Apex we also slightly reduced the gravity at this point and we improved the time once more okay so now we've got the most done but our game still doesn't feel quite right we are Miss missing something crucial can you guess what it is actually it's not just one thing but two Visual and auditory feedback so we added subtle animations particles and sound effects here is the result and the final run in all its Glory polishing was the most fun and we believe it made the biggest impact by the way we are not even making a jump and run but having a solid foundation in movement mechanics should not hurt there might be influences of the Jo in the final game and mixed genres are always something interesting but more on this in another video of course our controls aren't set in stone and we will refine them during further development but they already feel so much better than before what do you think we'd love to hear your feedback oh and here's our final high score thank you so much for watching bye

Channel: FiddleStone Games

Views: 30,377

Keywords: Godot Engine, Game Development, Indie Game Development, Game Programming, 2D Game Design, Indie Gaming, C# Programming, Godot Engine Tutorial, Game Dev Tips, Godot 4 Tutorial, C# for Game Development, 2D Platformer Game Dev, Platformer, Player Controls, Player Movement, Precision, Master Player Controls, Best Player Controls, Jump N Run, Rogue like, Rogue lite, Direct Input, Smooth Controls

Id: REzxBzQlhuc

Length: 6min 21sec (381 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024