5 tips for better platformer controls

Making a good, satisfying platformer is a lot harder and more involved than throwing a physics body on top of a tilemap and calling it a day, so here's a few tips for how you can make your platformer feel better to play, from the basics to some more advanced tricks.

The most fundamental thing: 00:00
Correcting player mistakes: 01:02
Custom jump functions: 03:08
Closing thoughts: 04:52

Correction: 04:50 Unfortunately, this video is no longer available.

[morganlak]

Also if your game has complex combat or a ton of different special abilities and actions, consider using an action queuing system instead of a state machine! It's way easier to manage

[Buglin_Burger]

A big thing with these is they are all worthless if you don't design levels with them in mind.

Getting Over It controls horribly, but is learnable and designed the world around it offsetting the issues. Celeste is a great example of how to design a world with good mechanics in mind. The jumps are often big because of the combination of Dashing and Coyote time which makes a wonderful experience for jumping over stuff while holding down to fast fall can help let you make things more floaty for mid-air control at base while giving an ability to snap down faster when needed.

So don't just put these mechanics into your game when it is done, design your game with these mechanics in mind.

[cerno_b]

This is absolutely amazing. I added delayed jump and coyote time within about 15 minutes and it was so much easier to implement than I had thought, the dead jump presses were really annoying before. Now it's a difference of day and night and it put a big fat smile on my face. I heard of coyote time before but haven't considered how easy it would be to implement. Thank you so much for this video. I'm going to try out your other suggestions but these two were a real quick change that improved the feel of my game loop a ton. Thank you!

[PLAYER_ready]

Another great thing to add is some form of momentum to your running! I’m not talking classic sonic style momentum, I mean like 2D Mario, how if you hold down the run button and keep going forward you’ll change into a few different running states. Some games may not need it but I enjoy having momentum

[ZachX]

Dude this is insane, thank you so much for this. I'm using Game Maker Studio v1.4.9999, which isn't available anymore, but the concepts were VERY helpful. Especially that toolkit! Thanks!

[_mickmccarthy]

Just gotten back into gamedev after a few years out and your videos have been invaluable in getting me back up to speed! Props for including some footage of Dustforce. Some of the best platforming controls of any game I've played.

[taylorrathbone]

The other day I learned the script just for the player movement in Celeste is over 5700 lines. Fuckin wild

[MatheusFaustino]

Dude, this is amazing material you have there, please, continue releasing videos like that. It stands out from the rest of things here on youtube. Saw your video twice and also, I am grateful that you have written version of it 👏Have a nice and a lot of success o/

[jswp]

There’s also a pragmatic argument for features like coyote time and jump buffers. The idea of any game is to put a player in the shoes of the character they’re playing as. In real life, you would never mistime a jump because you can physically feel the ground beneath your feet and know exactly when to jump again. When you’re running to jump off a ledge in real life, you can pace yourself and make sure your feet are in the right position to give yourself the optimal distance. In games, obviously, none of that is available to the player, so concessions need to be made to bridge that gap. I’d encourage everyone to use these tips, but also experiment with new ways to achieve the same (or possibly even better) results. You never know what you’ll discover by just playing around and trying things out.

[gemfruitgames]

A lot of people give a lot of advice (and I'll always be thankful to ANYONE trying to share), but I can absolutely tell from the way you talk, explain, showcase, etc, that you know what you're talking about. You have that unknown "thing" that people say is what it takes to succeed in various fields, and you have it here. Hope to learn more from you moving forward, keep it up!

[SpringySpring]

For the custom jump function you mentioned, thank you so much for actually showing some examples. As you said, it would be lazy to just punt us to another video and leave it at that. I agree that the GDC talk on the mathematics behind jumps is a really good resource, but it also takes a pretty long time to get through it. You did amazing by actually taking the time to showcase a custom jump function!

[epimolophant]

This is a perfect video to send to idea guys, when they say "when you press this button it jumps", having no idea of everything that goes behind it

[quinndepatten]

Great video, I'm going to use this as a reference. I'm working on platforming mechanics for my next game, this new information makes me excited to work on that.
I see why you'd use a timer instead a raycast for a jump buffer. Timing is much more consistent, especially at high speeds where collision gets funky. Consistency is so important.
Also something I'd like to add to the idea of manipulating the players velocity mid-jump, this is also very useful for double jumps, slow falls or any ability that pops you up or stabilizes your momentum.

[quasar.nebula]

This is an awesome video with great production and pacing, and and the code examples have to be a huge help to anyone programming their own platformer from scratch! This video is drastically underviewed—but I got recommended it without having heard of your channel before, so hopefully the algorithm is at least thinking about blessing your channel :)

[sergodobro]

Thank tou for this video! I realy needed such content where some partially untold and unnoticed game mechanics are described!

[lime]

Good video. While most of these tips are mentioned in other GDC talks, I think they are definitely worth repeating. Also, thanks for including sources in the description.

[brandonjacksoon]

Thanks mate! Liked and subscribed on your awesome channel!

[ponderingpermanence]

Another good video, thanks for the upload!

[Afiotubin]

The good stuff, Shaggy the GOAT at it again <3

[EB-blcc]

My current game isn't a platformer but this video was awesome anyway. Love the ideas about giving players a little bit of leeway to avoid frustration and keep things fun. I think some of these concepts can be applied to other types of games for sure