[WIP] Platformer Pro

2DPC or PlatfomerPRO customers can join our slack team (forum replacement): https://platformerpro.slack.com/

This will be the place to go to suggest features, share custom code, and get real-time support (when I am online at least).

Email support or PM me here for an invite.

 

Here trizero@foxmail.com

 

what matters is what appeals to clients
Anyway, i would says just pick up a game like Mario Bross on WIIU , or play it with some emulator and you'll find all ideas you could add to a complete 2D platformer.

Good luck with the launch.

 

Hi all just a note that slack exposes the email address you use to sign up to all members of the group. I'm sure for most thats fine, but please feel free to use an alternative/throwaway email if you are concerned (and make sure you indicate which email I should use in your request).

- John A

 

Yeah there are still a million and one things I would like to add, I'm not short of ideas, the problem is prioritising those ideas! Thanks for your support.

One thing I'm going to do is a video series/twitch stream where I build out a full and polished game using Platformer PRO. This will be part tutorial, part me drinking my own kool-aid, and part promotional. Should be fun.

 

Just take the most important ones in a Mario game (Water is one important of them)

That's a good idea , as it will show people how to start a game from 0 and finish it using the kit. why not different twitch for different platformers gameplay ? Mario like, Contra with climbable walls , etc ...

If you use a ship instead of a player and put gravity to 0 , then you can turn your kit in some sort of shoot them up i guess ... it was just an idea passing by.

 

Johnny.. that sounds awesome. I'll bring the beers and pizza! Really stoked for the new release, and having a ton of fun building out some platforming goodness.

 

@outtoplay I'm sure you have offered me a beer before, but I didn't seem to get it!!

@zenGarden Swimming is done although I will have a replay of some old mario games and make sure it feels right (currently it feels like I remember it).

In other news:

- Fixed a head collider editor bug that had been gnawing at me for a while.
- Added some buttons to work with persistable classes
- Almost finished documenting enemies (but not uploaded yet)

Two more days until my sprint to the finish! Excitement building!

 

Hey Johnny, I'm really looking forward to the release of PlatformerPRO
That being said I still have some questions regarding expending charactercontrollers and their animations.

For example:

Our maincharacter can block attacks with a shield? Is block handled by the plugin? If not: is it a hassle to include it in my controller? In 2DPC I had to dive in the source code of the RaycastCharacterController and study it thouroughly in order to tweak it the way I needed to respond for things like Attacking and/or Blocking.

For some of our enemies we have so called "Attack Preparation"-States where they don't attack but ready themselves to attack (like getting their weapons out or something like that) - that also easier to setup?

 

Hi @BTStone,

there's no block built-in but the whole point of Platformer PRO is that movements are completely extensible. You can LITERALLY turn your character into a flying banana that controls like a shoot-em-up or have it bounce around using built-in physics before seamlessly transitioning back to the normal platform behaviour... Without touching any of the existing code.

With a little editor scripting (mostly copy 'n' paste) your custom movements will appear in the menu system and work exactly like the built-in ones.

You will need to spend a little time understanding how movements work, particularly how the transition control but its pretty well documented here: https://jnamobile.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/204201944-How-Movement-Works-I-

Your second case is already covered with a 'deploy' state as seen here:

Combining deploy + move is not out-of-the-box yet, but would be a minor update. The enemy movement is also pluggable in a similar way to the character movement.

- John A

EDIT: Also let me add I will be very eager to get people up and running with the new system, so if you do get stuck, I'll be happy to assist with the code.

 

THE SPRINT BEGINS, 4 days till submission.

To keep me motivated I'll be posting heaps of updates throughout the next 4 days (you may want to unwatch the thread ).

Step 1 - Sprint plan

 

Oh man, the day is almost here. Good luck John, we're all rooting for you!

 

@StevenWendel thanks mate, little posts like this are surprisingly helpful with motivation

 

It's only a draft but its almost palpable:



And yes I've decided to go with a price of $75 USD, I think its pretty reasonable.

 

Looks really great. Are there any camera effects included such as parallax scrolling or zooming based on character speed?

 

@inthemilkywat

- You can define camera zones and the camera will only move within them.

- You can set up multiple zones and have the camera transition smoothly (or instantly) between them when something happens (for example trigger when you reach a specific point, trigger on a dialog (for example to show where the special key is), trigger when you get a special power).

- Because the trigger system has one shots you can also make it so you can't back track (if thats right for your game)

- You can have the camera lock to character or do an acceleration based smooth movement that only kicks in after you move a configurable distance.

- Zoom on speed.

Its not as nice as the best 2D camera systems*, so for the next release (probably 2-3 weeks) I'm also integrating it with: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/42095 (author even giving me a free copy to smooth the integration).

*Unlike my input system which I think rivals the best, at least in context of a Platform Game

 

Absolutely worth 75$. I'm incredibly excited for this release, great job man, you've been at this a long time now!

 

Thanks for the reference mate! If there's anything I can do on ProCamera2D side to ease the setup for anyone using PlatformerPro let me know. Cheers![/user]

 

Blah falling behind, am still going to complete the must do's and release, but wont get as many should do's done as I want. Guess I will be writing documentation after work.

- John A

 

Go Johnny, go Johnny! *getting the dollars ready*

 

@Sachnmacha Thanks.

All but two documentation items done from the MUST do's, most of the SHOULD do's still remain. Heres some key info

- Cleaned up push and added pull. Pull has a few constraints but within those constraints its pretty good.

- Cleaned up all the default value settings for common movements so for the most part if you pick a new movement it will work without requiring adjustments (you still may want to tweak of course, but there were some movements that used to require setting several values before they did anything at all).

- Did all the screenshots for asset store.

- Retested everything on Android and iOS. Samples run at solid 60 fps on newish devices (30 FPS on an old iPhone 4).

- Ensured everything works on Unity 4.6 and Unity 5 (just doing Unity 5 to iOS builds now).

- Created the trailer:

 

Sounds great! Do you think you will have time to do a 3D Mecanim tutorial (like this but 3D: https://jnamobile.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205141160) before the release or will it be done later?

Also in https://jnamobile.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/205141130-Animation-Bridges-I- you mention "Mecanim 2D with transitions" as an option for simple 3D animation. When you have time, can you expand that part of the documentation a little so a newbie understands better the best practice to implement animation for a 2.5D platformer?

 

@Jaans Those two items are on the MUST do list. So yes they will be done if not tonight then tomorrow after work.

 

*BANG* Submitted.

Still need to update some doco but I figure Unity will take at least a few days to approve by which time I should be up to scratch on the doco front.

Not super interesting but API doc is at: http://jnamobile.com/API/v1.0.0/

(Darn there are a lot of classes)

 

yes !!! where is it !!!!

 

Fantastic - looking forward to this. Loving the beta. Pricing is perfect for the amount of work that obviously went into this. Hope Unity puts this on the fast track
Congrats Johnny!

 

Thanks guys. Already started work on v1.1 this morning, so many things I want to add.

 

I'm pretty exited to get my hands on the finished V1.0 I haven't been working on my project in awhile, but this will get me hyped to dive back in.

 

Amazing work! Congratulations on getting to v1.0

 

Johnny,
Silly question, but in theory, is movement like this possible without too much fiddling? Think side-scroller, possibly armed, sort of like Tiny Wings (if you remember that game). hugging the rounded terrain, but a little extra thrust can cause him to take air.

 

@outtoplay - The current physics ground + physics air movement with "stick to ground" turned off might give you a rough version of that (if you run fast enough you will launch) but I think it would require a custom movement to feel anything like tiny wings.

In my view a custom movement is easy, but it might not be quite so easy for someone else. This one would likely require a bit more than just copy/paste and minor adjustments to existing movement.

If I get the doco done I'll give it a shot on the weekend*. Seems like a nice thing to add to show off slope handling and also a custom movement (for example little demo where you walk normally on slopes but if you run and get some speed up it turns in to a tiny wings like control).

* No promises though, I'll probably have a lot of requests

 

You're a good man, a superior developer and all around right fellow. Much appreciation even for thinking bout it.

 

Heh thanks, but it is quite a topical one for me to do. Just realised the only 'slopes' my promo video has is the Loopy Hamster video (which isn't really about demoing slopes). Slopes were solved so long ago that I kind of forgot people care about them

 

+ 1 for thinking about slopes!
We use them excessively in our game

 

Just curious, will the release build allow you to assign a different button for the jetpack? Or is there possibly a work around I could use with the current beta build I have to implement this. I just want the player to be able to choose between either using the jetpack or regular jump, as I will only be giving them limited access to fuel through out the game. I would figure out how to implement this myself but... I kinda suck at code. lol

 

@Daniel311311 Its a two line change to make it use an action key instead of jump, I'll put that in to the next update as an editor option, but in case you want to change you need to update this code in AirMovement_JetPack:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. if (character.Input.JumpButton == ButtonState.DOWN ||
3.     character.Input.JumpButton == ButtonState.HELD) return true;
4.  

For the second case, having jetpack fall through to jump if there is no fuel, I think it should work now if you just put jetpack above the default air movement in the list of movements, but if not I'll set it up for you/update.

 

Ah ok, cool, so just replace "JumpButton" with the button of my choice in code then? Also, hypothetically speaking, would it be as simple of a fix to make it engage in place of a double jump. Like if you just press and release you perform a regular jump, but if you double tap and hold the jetpack is engaged (in which case you could double tap and release, or hold the second press to continue jetpack and while you have fuel available). I know, I get a little carried when thinking of all of the possibilities. Last question of the night I promise.

 

Hi mate pretty simple if you want it to replace double jump, but still would require a but of code. Come ask in the slack chat on the channel #custom-movements and I'll do it for you (I want slack chat to be the place where people engage on details so other users can easily benefit from it, search it, etc).

- John A

 

Cool with me. I'm new to slack, how will I find you?

 

Oops, never mind I just saw the post here about getting an invite. I logged a ticket.

 

@Daniel311311 Posted in slack.

@outtoplay - I had a check of what I could do with existing movements, its not really like tiny wings. Haven't had a chance to write a custom movement for this but pretty clear on how it will work, just need to find the time.


In other news:

- still no word from asset store review, hopefully soon.

- I'm slowly fleshing out the online doco, still a million and one things to document, but most of the critical ones done (triggers and attack system are the biggest ones that are not done).

 

awesome! just came here by accident and everything i saw in the video preview looks great!
one thing that just came into my mind: what about wall sliding and wall jumping, just like in super meat boy? thats the only thing i am missing. beside that.. great job!

 

There is wall sliding and wall jumping in Platformer pro, and there are many options to customize it too!

 

Asset was rejected:

Hi there,

Thanks very much for your submission to the Asset Store.

All assets in the asset store are already covered by a standard EULA which all customers agree to when signing up to the Unity Asset Store. To avoid confusion and legal conflict, we do not allow packages to include dependent licenses. You can find our EULA at http://unity3d.com/company/legal/as_terms
We request that you remove any extra licenses included in your submission and resubmit your project.

...​

My reply:

All of the assts are under the asset store EULA. Straight from the included LICENCE.txt:

This software is copyright John Avery 2014-2015.

All assets, scripts and contents are licensed under the standard Assert Store license ( https://unity3d.com/legal/as_terms ).

You may notice that some assets here are found other licenses elsewhere. For those items that are not public domain or WTFPL we have purchased special licenses allowing these items to be distributed under asset store terms.​

I specifically included this information so as to clear up any issue with people saying "This is from site XYZ". Where the licence wasn't compatible I purchased special licenses to ensure everything was meeting these terms. Let me say it again: All assets, scripts and contents are licensed under the standard Assert Store license ( https://unity3d.com/legal/as_terms ).

- John A

 

I guess I'll remove any reference to any other licence and my LICENCE.txt, thought I was doing the users a favour *sigh*

 

That's a bummer that it was rejected for that reason alone as your reasoning on that one makes sense to me.

 

Yeah, I guess they want it is simple as possible. No big deal except I probably go back to the end of the queue.

 

@PeterBrown here's a quick video I compiled:

​

There are (currently) three types of wall jump/slide/cling movements, you can pick the type form a list. Each has various settings such as control type, control leeway, cling gravity, jump height, etc.

 

​

Such a bummer. Was hoping to play with the final this week.

Quick question - I'll be using 2DTK, and they recommend using a 1 pixel to 1 meter ratio. Obviously that messes with gravity and the scale of your controllers (using beta). Do you recommend not using the 1:1 technique, or is there a graceful way of dealing with it.