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Guide to implementing 2D platformers (2012)

by vvoruganti on 9/27/24, 4:39 PM with 8 comments

  • by jonathanyc on 9/27/24, 5:13 PM

    I like the idea of a guide like this. Reminds me of “Implementation of Hex Grids,” another high quality game-related guide: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/implementation.h... and before that, “Beej’s Guide to Network Programming”: https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

  • by dang on 9/27/24, 6:22 PM

    Related. Others?

    Guide to implementing 2D platformers (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31450218 - May 2022 (37 comments)

    A guide to implementing 2D platformers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202275 - Sept 2015 (32 comments)

    The guide to implementing 2D platformers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4065033 - June 2012 (2 comments)

    The Guide to Implementing 2D Platformers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4005883 - May 2012 (2 comments)

  • by henning on 9/27/24, 5:49 PM

    For making the game more fun, you can then add features that are now standard/expected like coyote time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97_jvSPoRDo

  • by teddyh on 9/27/24, 9:04 PM

    > Type #1: Tile-based (pure)

    > Character movement is limited to tiles, so you can never stand halfway between two tiles.

    […]

    > Examples: Prince of Persia

    That is absolutely false. You can stand on any pixel in Prince of Persia. It’s when I find stupid errors like these that I start to question the entire article they appear in.

  • by matheusmoreira on 9/27/24, 5:38 PM

    > I believe that Mega Man actually employs infinite acceleration, that is, you’re either stopped or on full speed

    Yeah, acceleration is essentially infinite.

    https://tasvideos.org/GameResources/NES/Rockman/Data

    When moving horizontally there's very small lag at the start and then he accelerates to full speed pretty much instantly.

    When moving vertically by jumping, his speed is straight up set to some constant. There is downwards deceleration by gravity though, leading to "fall faster" tricks:

    https://tasvideos.org/GameResources/NES/Rockman#FallingFaste...

  • by moth-fuzz on 9/27/24, 7:37 PM

    I’ve implemented platformer collision dozens of times now and the only way I’ve found it to be genuinely smooth is to do it one pixel at a time, just like the author suggests.

    But something always bugs me about that - we know the closest edge of the closest obstacle, we know the vector of the player’s motion, by all accounts we should be able to calculate the point of contact in one go without doing any substeps.

    And yet, doing it in one pass always seems to result in a myriad of edge cases (literal!) that break the whole thing, unless you do heavy preprocessing, converting your tiles to a graph of lined surfaces, etc etc.