I feel like floaty jumps are overlooked a lot of the time. Super Mario World and N++ would be a lot more boring if Mario or the Ninja snapped right to max speed and didn't hang in the air. I think it's wrong to say that floaty jumps are imprecise and bad on the face of it. Sure, it may take more effort to land exactly where you want, but this allows for a lot of interesting decisions and level design. Even in this demo, having a floaty jump lets you skip lots of platforms which is fun and feels great to pull off, but its scary and risky when you go that fast. If you want to be safe, then you've really got to nudge the character along and that's fun too!
N++ is a really great counterexample to the usual "floaty = bad" way of thinking, for sure. Building characters with real momentum is often difficult (see how much of a mixed bag the Sonic games are for proof of this), but if you get it right, IMO it feels far better than Hollow-Knight-style immediate corner-turning.
I literally sent this to some of my former professors in my CS program who taught the game dev courses. I hope they see it! It'd slot nicely into the early courses.
i want to see you have an encoder/decoder for the settings, so you can send a quick string to your freinds which they can punch into their game(something like 0x7FFF1FA2...etc) so they can try your character immediately and quickly
I landed on spikes while in the toolbox mode and the character didn't die, but I couldn't jump either, making me trapped. I clicked on the flag icon which despawned the character but didn't respawn it seemingly, so I'm stuck now
Making ground accel and deaccel ridiculously high and making it so the character controls a bit tighter in mid air than on the ground is actually a lot of fun
Works even better with strong downwards gravity and variable jump height
Gives you this great feeling of forward momentum and having to react on the fly
When you are editing the settings, you are immune to spikes. When you exit the settings part, you can't jump, so you are stuck in the spikes and you can't do anything.
This is absolutely fantastic :) I'm a Lecturer and 100% intend to use this with my students when discussing the 3Cs since it perfectly illustrates so many of the concepts we'll be exploring. Thank you so much for making this - I learnt a great deal. Perhaps I should take inspiration from your excellent example and attempt to come up with something similar myself...!
Really cool way to teach game design, but the settings felt a bit limiting . You can't for example adjust turning speed midair or change your velocity when jumping so that running speed wont affect jump length so much.
It would be nice to have a quit button, other than that; I hope you make more of these for other design concepts like rpg stats, puzzle design, shooting, maybe 3d platforming.
The implementation of your mechanics are actually pretty important, as much as the settings. Nintendo's platformer's variable height works by partially decreasing the gravity as long as the jump button is held, giving it its moon-jump feel (and hence why the gravity feels heavier when you drop), while Meat Boy's gravity I believe is on a counter that you cut short by releasing, giving it that constant linear climb and sharp vertical control.
Floor deceleration is usually tweaked trough friction instead, with acceleration being reused to make you stop faster, to avoid that feeling of disconnection when you U-turns at low speed and your speed doesn't behave as you'd expect. That implementation means that deceleration is at least equal to acceleration (without using an initial impulse). Unless you are making some special ice physics for a curling stone !
What I'm missing is a way to describe why a lot of out-of-the-box-2D Simulated Physics platfomer games (Little Big Planet...) with continuous quadratic curves don't feel as good to play as the ones where the physics are discrete (arithmetic progression) or made up ; the jumps often just feels wrong. Like it goes "voof" instead of "boing". Are realistic forces the wrong way to handle acceleration in a way where you feel like you are in control ? Is it because the initial impulse for such a jump would not work in a realistic setting ? Or is there something in the continuous simulated implementation that makes it harder to tweak a specific behavior, like it's hard to make a rectangle wave with sinuses ?
Great addition. I understand why there weren't multiple implementations in this demo, but the specifics of how you handle non-full-height jumps in particular often inform the rest of your jump physics. Meat Boy, I remember reading somewhere, actually goes one further than what you described and will invert your y-velocity when you release the jump button to prevent the top of your arc from feeling floaty (as opposed to increasing downward acceleration).
As to why directly physics-engine based platformers don't feel quite right, agree that it's pretty hard to pin down. My guess is that objects and the player receive the same gravity in a physics engine to keep things consistent, but a natural-looking gravity for objects is too floaty for players and good player gravity makes the objects feel like they're on Jupiter. I'd need to experiment more though.
This is so cool! It's so easy to tweak a value, test, repeat. This is such an amazing tool for learning about the technical details of platformers. I personally learned a ton about acc/deceleration and jump arcs, which has always been a topic I was unsure about.
It was such a good idea to include those presets at the end. I spent a lot of the tutorial attempting to replicate the feel of various game characters, so having those presets was a ton of fun! It's very informative to see the numbers used to replicate these characters.
Thank you for making this. I came down with a pretty awful ear infection and was feeling pretty crummy. This was a great way to distract myself for a while.
Great job Mark, I think this is really interesting and even people who don't make games can really understand the basics. Great explanation and performance!
I'd like to report a bug tho, and it is that sometimes the double jump doesn't trigger. I couldn't find the exact reason but a lot of times i tried to double jump, kit just wouldn't do it.
Little bug: Somehow when I'm running towards a stack of 2 boxes and jump, I'm pushed backwards instead of being allowed to move towards the boxes and get on top of them.
Settings:
53 acceleration, 16 max speed, 74 deceleration, 3.8 Jump Height, 10 Down Gravity, 0.2 Duration, 1 Air Control, 1 Air Brake, both checkboxes set to on, 5 Zoom, 2 Damping X and Y, 0.5 Lookahead, Ignore Jumps off.
It started before I changed anything in Assists (Only noticed after I unlocked the assists panel though)
This an educational masterpiece! Absolute visual treat and a solid source of knowledge is what this is! I have always thought of your channel as a source of game dev wisdom and great hints on how dem big boys doing it.
This is however another level. This is a brilliantly executed interactive tutorial!
Thank you for your effort and time dedicated to make this.
My one problem is that "air resistance" (deceleration when you let go of the buttons) is lumped under the same control as "air brakes" (deceleration when you hold the backward button in the air). Some games have them very similar, some games have them far apart, and that's an important design decision!
This is fantastic man, great job! Very helpful to be able to easily make these changes and see how it affects the movement. Wish I would have had this before making my first game but it will certainly help for the next one!
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Awesome!
I feel like floaty jumps are overlooked a lot of the time. Super Mario World and N++ would be a lot more boring if Mario or the Ninja snapped right to max speed and didn't hang in the air. I think it's wrong to say that floaty jumps are imprecise and bad on the face of it. Sure, it may take more effort to land exactly where you want, but this allows for a lot of interesting decisions and level design. Even in this demo, having a floaty jump lets you skip lots of platforms which is fun and feels great to pull off, but its scary and risky when you go that fast. If you want to be safe, then you've really got to nudge the character along and that's fun too!
N++ is a really great counterexample to the usual "floaty = bad" way of thinking, for sure. Building characters with real momentum is often difficult (see how much of a mixed bag the Sonic games are for proof of this), but if you get it right, IMO it feels far better than Hollow-Knight-style immediate corner-turning.
nicenicenice nicenicenice I will share it in development groups !
WOW! this is a fun and cool game!
sick
Loved it!
I literally sent this to some of my former professors in my CS program who taught the game dev courses. I hope they see it! It'd slot nicely into the early courses.
i want to see you have an encoder/decoder for the settings, so you can send a quick string to your freinds which they can punch into their game(something like 0x7FFF1FA2...etc) so they can try your character immediately and quickly
Fun to just mess around w really cool!! :D
I landed on spikes while in the toolbox mode and the character didn't die, but I couldn't jump either, making me trapped. I clicked on the flag icon which despawned the character but didn't respawn it seemingly, so I'm stuck now
You can softlock yourself if you fall onto the spikes with the menu open.
Making ground accel and deaccel ridiculously high and making it so the character controls a bit tighter in mid air than on the ground is actually a lot of fun
Works even better with strong downwards gravity and variable jump height
Gives you this great feeling of forward momentum and having to react on the fly
Makes me want to make that into an actual game...
When you are editing the settings, you are immune to spikes. When you exit the settings part, you can't jump, so you are stuck in the spikes and you can't do anything.
This is absolutely fantastic :) I'm a Lecturer and 100% intend to use this with my students when discussing the 3Cs since it perfectly illustrates so many of the concepts we'll be exploring. Thank you so much for making this - I learnt a great deal. Perhaps I should take inspiration from your excellent example and attempt to come up with something similar myself...!
Really cool way to teach game design, but the settings felt a bit limiting . You can't for example adjust turning speed midair or change your velocity when jumping so that running speed wont affect jump length so much.
This was absolutely fantastic Mark, thank you for making this.
I like it, but once it got to juice, for some reason well over half my jump inputs just got ignored, which made the rest completely unplayable
This happened to me too!
It would be nice to have a quit button, other than that; I hope you make more of these for other design concepts like rpg stats, puzzle design, shooting, maybe 3d platforming.
Super cool Mark, great idea to make a game about making games, would love to see more in the future!
The implementation of your mechanics are actually pretty important, as much as the settings. Nintendo's platformer's variable height works by partially decreasing the gravity as long as the jump button is held, giving it its moon-jump feel (and hence why the gravity feels heavier when you drop), while Meat Boy's gravity I believe is on a counter that you cut short by releasing, giving it that constant linear climb and sharp vertical control.
Floor deceleration is usually tweaked trough friction instead, with acceleration being reused to make you stop faster, to avoid that feeling of disconnection when you U-turns at low speed and your speed doesn't behave as you'd expect. That implementation means that deceleration is at least equal to acceleration (without using an initial impulse). Unless you are making some special ice physics for a curling stone !
What I'm missing is a way to describe why a lot of out-of-the-box-2D Simulated Physics platfomer games (Little Big Planet...) with continuous quadratic curves don't feel as good to play as the ones where the physics are discrete (arithmetic progression) or made up ; the jumps often just feels wrong. Like it goes "voof" instead of "boing". Are realistic forces the wrong way to handle acceleration in a way where you feel like you are in control ? Is it because the initial impulse for such a jump would not work in a realistic setting ? Or is there something in the continuous simulated implementation that makes it harder to tweak a specific behavior, like it's hard to make a rectangle wave with sinuses ?
Great addition. I understand why there weren't multiple implementations in this demo, but the specifics of how you handle non-full-height jumps in particular often inform the rest of your jump physics. Meat Boy, I remember reading somewhere, actually goes one further than what you described and will invert your y-velocity when you release the jump button to prevent the top of your arc from feeling floaty (as opposed to increasing downward acceleration).
As to why directly physics-engine based platformers don't feel quite right, agree that it's pretty hard to pin down. My guess is that objects and the player receive the same gravity in a physics engine to keep things consistent, but a natural-looking gravity for objects is too floaty for players and good player gravity makes the objects feel like they're on Jupiter. I'd need to experiment more though.
This is so cool! It's so easy to tweak a value, test, repeat. This is such an amazing tool for learning about the technical details of platformers. I personally learned a ton about acc/deceleration and jump arcs, which has always been a topic I was unsure about.
It was such a good idea to include those presets at the end. I spent a lot of the tutorial attempting to replicate the feel of various game characters, so having those presets was a ton of fun! It's very informative to see the numbers used to replicate these characters.
Thank you for making this. I came down with a pretty awful ear infection and was feeling pretty crummy. This was a great way to distract myself for a while.
Absolutely brilliant! The concept of an interactive essay is so unique and the execution is outstanding! Can't wait for more of your work.
Vertical scroll (present in "Juice" and settings tabs) is too slow. A single click of the mouse scroll wheel scrolls by a uselessly tiny amount.
Great job Mark, I think this is really interesting and even people who don't make games can really understand the basics. Great explanation and performance!
I'd like to report a bug tho, and it is that sometimes the double jump doesn't trigger. I couldn't find the exact reason but a lot of times i tried to double jump, kit just wouldn't do it.
Very cool! Minor bug report tho - if you're in toolkit mode, the spikes can't kill you, they just disable your jump until you exit
You should do a 3d platformer Toolkit
This is awesome! I do think the mario approximation is a bit off :P
i think it's because you lack a run button. no one plays the mario games without running
It would be nice to be able to skip the voice lines.
Hit P to skip - and there's a "skip all" button on the title screen :D
I love this!
Little bug: Somehow when I'm running towards a stack of 2 boxes and jump, I'm pushed backwards instead of being allowed to move towards the boxes and get on top of them.
Settings:
53 acceleration, 16 max speed, 74 deceleration, 3.8 Jump Height, 10 Down Gravity, 0.2 Duration, 1 Air Control, 1 Air Brake, both checkboxes set to on, 5 Zoom, 2 Damping X and Y, 0.5 Lookahead, Ignore Jumps off.
It started before I changed anything in Assists (Only noticed after I unlocked the assists panel though)
Absolutely amazing work Mark!
This an educational masterpiece!
Absolute visual treat and a solid source of knowledge is what this is!
I have always thought of your channel as a source of game dev wisdom and great hints on how dem big boys doing it.
This is however another level. This is a brilliantly executed interactive tutorial!
Thank you for your effort and time dedicated to make this.
Fun tool, well done.
I felt like the jumping speed should not receive so much input from the running speed though. Jumping acceleration and de-acceleration are off.
This is so cool
Excellent job!
My one problem is that "air resistance" (deceleration when you let go of the buttons) is lumped under the same control as "air brakes" (deceleration when you hold the backward button in the air). Some games have them very similar, some games have them far apart, and that's an important design decision!
Hi, it would be nice if you added also a linux version
Hello.
I think it would be nice if you uploaded the controller script so that people could use the settings they make here and use it in there own games.
This is fantastic man, great job! Very helpful to be able to easily make these changes and see how it affects the movement. Wish I would have had this before making my first game but it will certainly help for the next one!