Good news, you are at the right place! Indeed, I wrote a workshop that lays the foundations of platform game development. I won't define what a platform game is here, for a presentation I invite you to read the first step of this workshop.
In this workshop it is not about managing advanced graphics but rather about setting up the first mechanics of the game. We will see how to make our character move:
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make him walk, jump up or from one platform to another. We will also see how to set up the free fall which occurs when the character leaves a platform without any other platform under his feet.
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Then we'll look at interactions with the world:
- how to pick up an object like a key,
- how to make this key interact with a door so that the door only opens if the key is in the inventory.
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Then we will manage the game: we will add a stopwatch so that we can measure the elapsed time. This timer will allow us to add a mechanism that ends the game after a certain time if the player has not opened the door and displays "game over" on the screen. Moreover, as the game is timed, we will add a management system for the best scores (the lowest times).
I come back to an important point: To design your platform game the poster of rectangles will be enough to replace the hero, the platforms, and any other element of the game! Indeed, before creating your sprites and other graphic elements, it is easier to modify the size of rectangles during the calibration of the game and this is how we will design together our first platformer game. When you have all your gameplay elements then you can create your graphical elements and substitute them for the rectangles that were used for setting up and testing the game engine. Don't try to skip any steps, you could lose a lot of time otherwise. Imagine having spent hours creating all the elements of the scenery and animations for your character and then realizing that he is a little too big and that you will have to shrink him. In order to make your scenery consistent with the character, you will also have to touch them up to reduce their size...
Finally, before letting you discover the workshop, here is a compilation of screens from the game that we will design:
