Hey there, and thanks for checking out my first devlog entry for a video game I am creating. I’ll post any worthwhile updates to the state of the video game I am making here, and do my best to explain some of the goals I want to achieve within the video game. With that said, lets get the basics out of the way.
So I am starting a game that will be a “simple 2.5D” “side scrolling” platformer. What I mean by this is, I will be making the game out of a 3D environment and locking the camera along X Axis of the world, then the player with run along and interact with items, elements and enemies along the same X Axis as well as including the Y Axis for verticality to the game. I am pulling inspiration from games I played as a kid that were my absolute favorites to play growing up in the 90s, which are Mega Man, Earth Worm Jim, Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario.
With that said, I first wanted to create a little test level to work on testing basic mechanics such as moving and jump. Once I did that, I got a player-controller made up in the shape of a capsule and got the controls set up for moving and jump. I also put in two different coloured balls with in the test map to serve the purpose of making basic collision detection was working. But I noticed something after I had that all working that just didn’t seem to sit well with me. If you notice in the gif above, whenever the capsule jumps and happens to be under a platform, the capsule sorta just… Hovers. Let me tell you, that drove me insane internally.
But I figured it out, after a painstaking 4 hours. Which seems absolutely silly in retrospect because it was a simple fix so the capsule would bounce off the ceiling of a platform above. Like one my best friends says, “sometimes you just gotta take it on the chin”, and I feel like I’m going to take A LOT of moments “on the chin” throughout this project. That is okay though, now the capsule doesn’t just hover until a platform!
You may or may not have also noticed the test level is slightly different than it was in the first gif. That’s because I got bored of just pushing the balls around. So I put 2 pits in the level that the balls can be pushed into. Nothing fancy, super simple. But I also have some other level design choices that pushed me into the next mechanic I wanted to implement. The Double Jump. Remember when I said I figured I would need to take a lot of moments “on the chin”? This was another one, and I actually needed to enlist the help my cousin (thank you so much Hammy) to figure it out, while also setting up back-up solutions and a github repo for him and I for the game. So after an additional 3 hours after working on the “hovering under the platform” issue, I still couldn’t figure out the double jump mechanic. So I saved the project as it was, all working – minus the double jump – and went to sleep for the night to go to my day job for the next morning. I gave Hammy a run down on my issue and when I got home from work we tackled it right away.
I don’t deserve this man, but he figured out my spaghetti code and how to make a double jump mechanic work with in it. The man is a wizard, truly.
That is all I have for a first devlog. Hope it is okay, and I will keep track of major changes that worth piecing together for more devlogs. Thanks for reading!