Category Archives: Platformer

Sidescrolling Platformer – Part 13 – Enemy Interactivity

As I announced in the last post, I am extremely busy right now. Luckily for you, a member of the community has already stepped up and written a Part 13 for this side scrolling tutorial! In this tutorial, you’ll learn to create “bumper” objects for your enemies to interact with, which will let them patrol back and forth. You’ll also look for collisions between the player and the enemies, so you can take damage in your game. Cool!

I’ll hand it over now to the newest guest writer around here, Ed Nordmeyer (thanks, Ed!)

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Ben covered creating enemies and making them disappear when they’re shot in lesson 12, so in lucky lesson 13, in this guest tutorial, I’ve picked up where the last lesson left off in the side scrolling platform game.

This will cover making the enemies move, how to block them in so they’ll patrol in a simple side-to-side motion, and have them interact with your player if they touch you. Following in Ben’s footsteps, if I had to choose between making the code readable or making the code ultra efficient and take up the least amount of lines, I tried to make the code as easy as possible to understand.

Creating the Bumper class

If you’ve followed the tutorial steps so far, you’ll find that creating the bumper class is very, very similar to the other classes made so far. For the artwork, I just made a square that was about a 25×25 pixels in size. I created this block on the background layer outside of what the player screen shows when you’re running the game. We’ll go back and made the blocks transparent later, but for now I’d recommend making them easy to see to help placing them on the screen from our code.

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Sidescrolling Platformer — Part 12 — Basic Enemies

Welcome back to the side scrolling tutorial series. In this session, we will be adding (very) basic enemies to the game, which you can shoot and destroy with the bullets we created previously. This will create a lot of possibilities for what you can do with your game. In later tutorials we will add a scoring system and more advanced A.I. (artificial intelligence) to the enemies, but for now let’s focus on: creating the Enemy class, adding a few enemies to the game map, and destroying them when they are hit by a bullet.

Creating the Enemy Class

Creating the Enemy class is very similar to creating the Bullet class. If you just read Part 10 and Part 11, most of this step will look the same as when we made the Bullet class and symbol.

First, we need art. We need to create a Movie Clip object to represent the enemy on the stage. Feel free to decorate your enemy however you choose — it could be a random, inanimate object, a crazy monster, or anywhere in between.

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Sidescrolling Platformer — Part 11 — Fixing the bullets

Although we did get some functional bullets last time by using the Bullet class, we still need to make some major improvements. First of all, the bullets are added directly to the stage and have no idea about the scrollX and scrollY variables, so they don’t react when the player moves left, right, up, or down. Also, the bullets move at a sluggish pace — if they did react to the player’s movements, you could practically outrun them. Finally, they are never actually removed from the stage, so we waste precious memory that slows down the game. Imagine that we fired 1,000,000 bullets. The game would still be keeping track of all of them, constantly updating their positions, even if they are no longer on the stage. There’s some more code we can add to the bullets to handle all of this, and we are going to implement it in this tutorial.

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Sidescrolling Platformer — Part 10 — Shooting

Welcome back to the flash game tutorial: how to make a side scrolling platformer game in actionscript 3. I can’t believe we’re already up to part ten! As you can probably tell from the title, this tutorial part will exclusively feature shooting. Not all platformer games require this feature, but I’ve had a bunch of requests for this tutorial — probably because side scrolling shooters are an amazing game genre (for example, the classic Metroid games). We don’t have anything yet for our bullets to interact with, but don’t worry — next tutorial we will add the enemies. For now, let’s just focus on getting our hero to shoot.

Here is a preliminary demo of what we’ll be creating. Use the space bar to fire.

An External Actionscript File

…I knew this moment would arrive eventually… the moment when — *gasp* — we finally need to use a custom class and an external actionscript file. If you’ve never programmed anything with Object Oriented Programming before, and you’ve never created an external .as file, this might seem intimidating. Or perhaps you have no idea what I’m talking about. No matter where you stand right now, I hope that by the end of this tutorial you will have a solid idea of what external classes are, why we use them, and how to create a Class for the bullets. In future tutorials we will go into more depth on the topic.

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Sidescrolling Platformer — Part 9 — Animated Player Movements

All great platformers have animated heroes. Even Super Mario, which was released in 1985, used several animations for the player. Why? Because it would look completely unrealistic if Mario just stood frozen in one animation while he runs and jumps around the level. So it makes sense that we should add animations to our player. This will add yet another step of realism to the game.

Try running, jumping, or standing still. See how the player’s animation state reacts:

My art could definitely be improved, but I’ll demonstrate how to create these 3 animations for simplicity’s sake.

The Structure

The most important aspect of giving any game element multiple animation states, is to make sure you structure it correctly. When I first started programming, I tried to put all of the animations on a single timeline, and the resulting structure was too cluttered and complicated that it was difficult to make things work the way I wanted them to. So now I’m sharing with you a simpler method.

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Sidescrolling Platformer — Part 8 — Multiple Levels

Here’s the post you’ve all been waiting for… how to connect multiple levels in your platformer!

Try out this demo. Press the down arrow key upon opening the door to warp to the next level:

After adding the door and key last time, the next step is to make the door lead to the next level. “How?”, you might ask… just read on to see the magic unfold.

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Sidescrolling Platformer ~Part 7~ Keys and Doors

First, I’d like to apologize for my brief hiatus over the past month — I upgraded to a new computer, and Flash was out of commission for a while. But assuming you haven’t abandoned this site yet, here’s the next part of the side scrolling series.

Last tutorial pretty much finished up the bare-bone mechanics and visuals of a basic platformer. So I figured with this tutorial we’d start adding various extra features to spice up the game. This time, we’re adding a collectible key to the level, as well as a locked door which it will open. This door might be the end of one of your levels, which in turn might load a new level afterwards (although we aren’t coding multiple levels in this tutorial — just the door and key which will allow for this in the future).

Make sure you’ve read up through Part 6 of the series.

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Sidescrolling Platformer ~Part 6~ Parallax Scrolling and Multi-Layer Visuals

Welcome to the sixth installment of the AS3 Side Scrolling Platformer tutorial series.

The background scrolls. The player collides with walls, and can jump (and even double jump). Our laws of physics have been established, and the basic mechanics are coded. In other words, we have built a working prototype. In this tutorial, we will step our platformer up a notch by adding in fancier visuals, and even the capability for layers of parallax scrolling, which will give the game the sense of depth which it is lacking.

This is a pretty good tutorial, which will really improve your game if you’ve been following along. When all is said and done, this is what we will accomplish:

(click to activate, and control with the arrow keys)

Continue reading for a step-by-step guide on making this game

Sidescrolling Platformer ~Part 5~ Double Jumping

I know, in Part 4 I promised to cover the fancy visuals and parallax scrolling next, but here’s one more nifty game mechanic I wanted to add in first. (It’s quick.)

Double Jumping! Perhaps the greatest — most unrealistic — most lovable game mechanic ever.

This isn’t necessary for all games, and maybe you don’t want to add double jumping to your platformer game. But if you do want to add it, all that it requires is a bit of logic and a couple of Boolean variables. Plus, it will allow you to design cooler environments because the player will be able to reach more places than before.

This is what it will look like:

(Click on the preview below to activate it, then use the arrow keys to move around. Press the up arrow twice to double jump.)

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Sidescrolling Platformer ~Part 4~ Gravity and Jumping

In Part 3 we took a simple, scrollable background and added a layer of realistic player interaction by adding collisions and smoother movement. But we didn’t have the time to finish our player interaction by adding gravity and jumping, so that’s what we’ll do in this part. We are also going to add a few small tweaks to earlier game mechanics so that everything runs better.

Get ready for another great tutorial. I put more time into this one than I expected to.

Gravity

Adding gravity is actually really easy. If you have any experience with Physics, you know that gravity causes an acceleration on objects. And an acceleration is nothing more than a change in speed. In an ideal situation on earth, an object’s velocity downwards increases by 9.8 meters per second for every second that it’s falling. So in our game, we will increase the speed of the player by a certain number for every frame that he is falling.

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