How To Fail At Making A Platformer

Feel like your platformer is progressing too well? This video will help you stop being so great!

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Music:
Doh De Oh by Kevin MacLeod

[alexrexaros]

You forgot that, as any good game designer would tell you, autoscroll lecels are never bad. They dont restrict your speed or movement by forcing you to wait until the screen has moved far enough!

[Artindi]

If you think this was funny.... Stop. It wasn't... This is a totally serious tutorial series and should be respected as such. ;)

[Kwlla]

Hot take: I think that making a main menu will actually not help you fail. This is because I think that — as long as you don’t spend to long on it — it can make your game look a little more finished which can be motivating

[henryhere]

Important note: your players need the freedom to control the camera, so make it so that the camera only moves when they want it to, and never automatically!

[niracaldwell]

i love how one of my first ever projects was a platformer that followed everything in this video unknowingly. i'm sorta glad i gave up on it but it gave me good experience in game dev i guess

[bigredradish]

what's most important in creating a platformer is making sure your camera is zoomed in tight and your player character moves incredibly fast. you want that exhilarating platformer rush but you also want players to appreciate your tilesets

[Ultimaximus]

I would've also considered adding underwater levels to your platformer. It is really fun to go from gameplay that rewards speed and precision to very slow and clunky gameplay that takes away all of your movement abilities and sometimes takes away some of your attacking abilities as well

[spindash]

It seems to me like the common-ness of the Double Jump is really about something much more integral: air mobility. A double Jump is one of the simplest ways to let the player reset their speed and position mid-jump without completely breaking the game.

However, it is far from the only way. To name a few examples off the top of my head:

-Spin Jump in Super Mario Galaxy: it may technically count as a double jump, but I think its implementation is unique enough to warrant a pass

-Stomp attacks: these let the player quickly get back to the ground in the event of either being knocked away, or just needing to return to ground state, and also makes for a very cool attack

-homing attack, Sonic Adventure onwards: without a target to lock onto, this is a simple air dash, helping the player quickly regain speed after slowing down for a jump. But with a target, the attack will joke Sonic in to jump off of them without the player needing to precisely line him up. This can let Sonic effectively _fly_ across a stage for as long as there is a chain of targets to hit

-aerial recovery, Kingdom Hearts: by being able to cancel your knockback animation in midair, the player can quickly escape a dangerous combo situation and return to the fight

[atroxxious]

instructions unclear: i made celeste 2

[kasane]

I think even better than dash and double jump are wall jumps that are extremely difficult to pull off so only about one third of your players actually gets to use that ability (and many don't use it because there's no real reward for being able to pull them off)

[waffful]

Thank you! I am currently trying to make a 2D platformer so this really helps me by knowing what pitfalls to avoid. I was feeling a bit demovtivated because I could tell my game wasn't going in a fun direction but now you've given me the motivation to keep going and try different things. (Especially with the core mechanic thing, I was developing just a regular 2D platformer).

[fgvcosmic]

This is the "terrible writing advice" channel of gaming and I love it

[ForwardSynthesis]

I would argue making the simplest platformer possible without expansive movement options is a good learning step. Plus you get the motivation of knowing you made a game at all, full stop, even if it isn't the best. First project: make a platformer. Second project: make a GOOD platformer.

[JuhoSprite]

Working on my first ever platformer game, this is exactly what I needed

[spotishii]

I love videos like these. Instead of giving you things TO do, they give you things NOT TO do. Sets you on a better path in life ❤

[Rossiter]

"precision platformer = fail"
**slowly looks over at my Steam/itch library, which is 20% precision platformers**

[bartbongers]

Sometimes it is better to know what NOT to do in geme dev. Says me, who is learning game development and making a platformer with no interesting core mechanic XD

[danolantern]

I want to make a rage platformer now with a knight cursed to always double jump, even if they have the heaviest armor that weighs two tonnes and are trying to simply jump 1 inch off the ground, and their motivation is to kill some wizard that cursed them to this.

[amdan.amid]

Super creative way to deliever the msg, laughed through most of it. I don't think the message would have delievered the same if the video was "How To Sucess At Making A Platformer". Good job!

[armin]

Pretty high quality vid, deserves some more views 👍
Edit: "You're the game designer, you know what's fun." lmao