#platformer development Post

[tetley1173-igb220-blog]

Platformer Development

What have I been trying to achieve with my platformer game?

I've been trying to learn the basics of Gdevelop including how to create sprites with animations and how to add behaviour to a game world. My goal has been to get the game to a state were it can be tested meaning it has a goal for the player and some interesting choices to make.

What's something I learned during its development?

A lot of work goes into making a basic thing happen in a video game. Moving forward I'm going to start work early so I can keep up with my goals each week and I'm going to focus on the basics. Hopefully as I get better at basic tasks like creating sprites and adding game logic I can do these tasks faster. Then I can hopefully focus more on the gameplay rather than the mechanics of setting up a game.

What has inspired me in my readings?

One of the biggest concepts that stuck with me was Johan Huizinga's concept of the 'Magic Circle' as referenced in Game Design Workshop chapters 2 and 3. The magic circle is the place that people agree to go to when they engage in a game (Fullerton). The part of this concept that was striking to me was the need for an invitation into this circle. Normally when you play a game like a card game the invitation is literal, someone asks you if you'd like to play the game, if you accept, you sit down and play the game according to the rules. In a video game the invitation is more metaphorical, the title screen is often considered to be the 'invitation' to the game. This immediately made sense to me as the title screen has often been make or break for me being sucked into a game.

This screenshot is a great example. Its the title screen of OpenTTD a transport management game were you build trains, ship, trucks and planes to fulfil the transport needs of the various cities in the game. I love title screens like this one, it fills me with inspiration everytime I open the game. I think wow, look at all those train lines and how massive that city has become. It makes me excited to jump in and try to make a massive train network just like it.

How can I apply this to my games?

Now that I'm getting a firm grasp on the basics, I'm going to make it my mission to apply this concept to my games. In the next couple of uni tutorials I'm going to try and figure out how I can add my own title screens to games. I'm going to think about how I can make those screens an interesting and exciting invite to play my games.

References:

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop. 3rd ed., A K Peters/CRC Press, 2014.

[n11245191]

Platformer Development Post

This week I have progressed from learning and into execution.

Focusing on my movement, enemies, weapons, and map design.

I had a basic game of the player running around and jumping on enemies.

However, I wanted a new method of defeating them, so I came up with the idea of implementing a new weapon to defeat enemies, adding an extra layer to the game. I ended up sticking with a boomerang as a weapon, which would take out the enemies. So I started making weapon designs, and ended up with this as my boomerang.

After a few attempts at designing my boomerang, I decided to stick with the more pixelated design and chose the colour blue as to easily identify the weapon.

During week 3 of the workshop we conducted Playtesting which I grabbed a friend and got them to play my basic game without saying too much. This allowed them to learn the game all on their own, and allowed me to identify the learnability of the game. I realised that it wasn't immediately obvious for them that they had to jump on the enemies heads, and to make it more obvious I should have the player jump down onto a platform which would kill an enemy at the beginning. This would therefore encourage them to do it more often.

I was also asking about my boomerang idea for the game, which they stated the design was very cool, and had the idea of making the player have to pick up the weapon again when it hit the enemy as to make it more realistic.

After playtesting I had many ideas to work with and look forward to what I could create in GDevelop from here on out.

[asgardian--angels]

**URGENT** HELP SAVE THE USGS BEE LAB!

PLEASE circulate this as widely as possible, as soon as possible.

Hi all, you may not know me but I am a native bee researcher in the eastern US. People like me work to study and protect the 3600 species of native bees in North America, many of which are in severe decline.

We just received devastating news, that unfortunately was not surprising. The Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget is set to defund most of the ecological research happening at the USGS, and that includes zeroing out the budget for the USGS Native Bee Inventory & Monitoring Lab.

Don't know them? Maybe you've seen stunning photos like this:

These gorgeous and evocative focus-stacked photos of native bees on black backgrounds - all of which are public domain - come from the USGS Bee Lab (here's their Flickr). Through these, they've helped bring the beauty and importance of native bees to the public's attention. Hundreds if not thousands of news articles, videos, and publications use these photos.

But that is just one tiny slice of what the USGS Bee Lab does for pollinator conservation. Its primary role is much bigger; they provide technical support, research collaborations, and financial & grant partnerships to federal and state agencies, academic institutions and researchers, and much more, so we can study, manage, and protect North America's wild pollinators. They conduct research of their own that has led to species rediscoveries, and produce invaluable resources that have greatly advanced our understanding of wild bees and our approaches to studying and conserving them. They also provide the essential and irreplaceable service of bee identification. For those who don't know, identifying bees is hard. Sometimes Really Hard. And this lab is one of just a handful of places in the entire country who can identify some of the toughest groups of bees, and who sit on the forefront of breakthroughs on taxonomy and identification that the rest of us in this field rely on. Without this service, agencies and researchers trying to survey and monitor bees in order to track population declines, manage land, and get policy changed are stuck with a lot of nameless bees, severely limiting the usefulness of that data.

Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of bee specimens pass through this lab annually, plus the thousands in permanent storage, from long-term monitoring efforts by state and federal agencies, and researchers like myself. They operate at a greater capacity than basically any other institution doing this kind of work. Few if any bee researchers in the eastern US, or even the country, have not benefitted from this lab's work, and those benefits are passed on to you through being able to protect pollinators and the services they provide both in agriculture and ecosystems.

This lab is headed up by scientist Sam Droege, who has dedicated decades of his life to this cause, and whom I consider not just a research partner but, humbly, a friend. I am utterly indebted to him for helping me get my start in this field, and for the support and kindness he has shown me and every other young professional who is passionate about pollinators. The Lab operates with an insanely small budget already, and a very limited staff, yet the impact they have is exponentially outsized. Losing the USGS Bee Lab would be a devastating blow to pollinator conservation in this country, at a time when native bee species are sitting on the precipice, and sustainable agriculture is non-negotiable for our future.

You can read more about the Bee Lab here. The Lab is not well-publicized, but it's a lifeline for the many dedicated people who work to try and protect pollinators and the environment at large.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Sam Droege has sent out a request for help, and has encouraged us to post on social media. This is what he wants you to do to help us save the Bee Lab.

This is verbatim:

What is Happening: ·       The USGS Bee Lab is at risk of being permanently closed due to cuts in the 2026 Federal Budget and looming federal RIF’s ·       Specifically, the Ecosystem Mission Area (EMA) budget, which funds the USGS Bee Lab and the Eastern Ecological Science center has been zeroed out ·       Thousands of layoffs to hit Interior, National Parks imminently - Government Executive What you can do ·       Write to your representatives, the White House, and the Department of the Interior that they should restore the funding for the USGS Bee Lab ·       Send digital or physical letters, write emails, post to social media What you should be highlighting: ·       Personal anecdotes about how the Bee Lab has impacted you or your organization ·       How important the research the Bee Lab is conducting is to your state Contact Information: 1.      Representatives: Find Your Representative | house.gov 2.      Senators: U.S. Senate: Contacting U.S. Senators 3.      White House: Contact Us – The White House 4.      Interior: feedback@ios.doi.gov Send a copy of the letter to droegesam@gmail.com Pass this email around.  Post your response to social media

IT'S OK if you are not a scientist and have not directly interacted with the Bee Lab. Have you seen the lab's photos? Are you concerned about native pollinator declines? Are you aware of any pollinator conservation initiatives or policies in your own state - those almost certainly have drawn, directly or indirectly, from work the Lab has done. Speak about American food production and agriculture, how the Lab's research and collaborations are essential to safeguarding pollination services (this might help reach across the aisle).

Sam urges that these letters, emails, phone calls, etc, must happen quickly - within the next couple days. This information went out on May 8th and that is the day I am posting this. So please, don't wait.

If 'save the bees' has ever meant anything to you, this is the agency that is playing one of the biggest roles in this country in making that happen. Please, contact your representatives, and pass this call to action along however you can. Thank you.

[syoish-aot]

Does anyone else get frustrated by late stage capitalism's obsession with the monetization of free time?

[ultimitethepig]

Well I had a fun time recreating the movement style of a side-view perspective RPG Maker game (Lisa the Painful as the best example) in Godot over the course of a few days.

Next up I'd want to add to this is ladders and jumping off ladders.

[rabbithaver]

this person is such a miserable tar pit of a human being. the post was by a fan of Silver talking about how he keeps getting shoved aside by SEGA and this cunt immediately starts mocking the OP for... enjoying a character they don't like?

i scrolled through their other comments and it turns out they just specifically target Silver fans whenever the opportunity arises and harasses them for literally no reason. it's so immature and shitty.

anyway i replied with this image and ratio'd their ass before blocking them lmao

[mizukidevlog]

Devlog 21

Some crazy life events happened this week, so I'll be brief.

Did a lot of polishing on the player UI and added some animations, it's looking real good! (Animations not included...this time)

Now that UI stuff is finished I can move on to creating some menus and polishing up combat.

Here's a Mizuki flag for your enjoyment

[pawseds]

don't let me draw after coding for >=10h straight

[tetley1173-igb220-blog]

Platformer Develpement

This week I’ve continued to develop my platformer game to get it to a state where it can be play tested. It won’t be anything impressive, but it will teach me how to make a basic game using Gdevelop 5.

What have I been trying to achieve?

I’ve just been trying to understand the basics at this stage like how to animate things, set up events that trigger etc. To achieve this I’ve put together a basic world that the character can jump around in and I’ve been adding and tweaking things simply to learn how they work. For example, I strayed from the tutorial and tweaked the gravity value that controls jumping. I was able to make the character jump higher if the player holds the jump button down. I decided to keep this because I’ve enjoyed the mechanic in games I’ve played before.

What did I learn from this?

I re-learnt from back in the day when I used to mod Skyrim, that game development can be very time consuming. Chapter 10 of Game Design Workshop talks about development phases and how it is important to focus on the feature you are currently working on, get it completed, and don't worry about fixing every bug or problem that you find along the way (Fullerton). This was a mistake that I made as a modder as I never finished a project because I was using too much time making my creations look good instead of finishing the basic functionality that I was working on. Following the advice of the text book I’ve been making a low fidelity game but one that has interesting things to do in it. I've focused on making the game playable instead of fixing every movement bug or fleshing out all the animations. Its much more of a game than the Skyrim mod that looked pretty but didn’t do anything.

I also noted that changing things, like the jumping mechanics, can have wide ranging consequences in a complex system like a video game. I can see what Chapter 5 of Game Workshop meant when they were talking about game systems and how changing them can have cascading consequences (Fullerton). Changing how high my character could jump completely changed the game world as I had to make the platforms higher, so they remained challenging to reach. This resulted in my game world being 3 times higher than it was originally.

My next game should come together faster now I know the basics and what to focus my effort on. In my next post I’ll be talking about what I learnt from testing this game.

References:

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop. 3rd ed., A K Peters/CRC Press, 2014.

[boycritter]

im putting this blog on my college applications

[lone-sk]

So I'm taking a game prototyping class, and the teacher is forcing us to use various shitty metaverse WebGL SDKs and they're all just like. So bad. At even basic functionality.

This SDK has been out for over a year, and ladders are an "experimental feature."

LADDERS.

[creativematt]

New indie dev struggles are finishing one feature and having no idea what to work on next, or whether to keep developing that feature even more cause you never know what you'll end up needing for your project's needs

in other news I have astar pathfinding! i'll prob record a demo of that at some point

[punk-pins]

tumblr live update on mobile: it now has the option to snooze the live streams at the top of the dashboard for 30 days, but the video icon for the tumblr live tab in the middle of the footer can’t be disabled at all :/

[russell-crowe]

yes i am a scandinavian languages and cultures student but uh anyway,, here is my paper called "framing russell crowe: unraveling hollywood's bad boy narrative - a deeper dive into media portrayals and public perception" about particularly the first half of the 00s

[mizukidevlog]

Devlog 20

Dang, I've done 20 of these posts now. That's something right?

Been working on the GUI/HUD this week. Lots of time was spent figuring out what it should look like, and I'm pretty happy with the rough designs I came up with.

That is roughly where the health and teleport meters are going to be in the final game. Out of the way but hopefully still nice and visible. Any feedback on the size and positioning would be great! Haven't really done UI stuff before. Here is a closer look at what the life and teleport symbols look like:

The teleport wisp is a smaller version of the wisp I made last week (Original was too big for the UI)

The heart has the Japanese kanji for "Life" on it. I thought it would be a nice touch rather than having a plain heart.

That's all for this week. Thank you all so much for your suggestions on working through art/code block. Now I just need to make more time for game development.

<3