Tag Archives: Platformer

GrayVity – A (Challenging) Platformer

Making a platformer was my first goal after joining #onegameamonth and coming up with ideas. “Another Platformer?” you ask. Well yeah, of course there are a lot of them around, but I wanted to learn more about the genre that influenced almost a decade of game releases. I also believe that the simplicity of the controls and the resulting ease of access makes the genre perfect for a short amount of fast and simple fun.

My aim was to make a rather polished game, so I wanted to make two simple games first in order to have the rest of the time until the deadline for my platformer project. I succeeded with this initial goal and created Undead Stones and Crash Racer in Java and haXe NME respectively. These games  turned out OK in my opinion. I had some negligible struggle with both of them mostly because I was getting used to the language/framework.
Despite the minor problems I expect having while getting used to a new language/framework and the first approach probably being subpar I wanted to learn something new for this platformer. I enjoyed working with haXe a lot so I decided to play around with a framework that seems to be very popular for flash games: FlashPunk. In my case more precisely: HaxePunk.

Initially I was reluctant to use HaxePunk. You know: I like doing things myself and want to be as little limited/dependent by the work of others as possible. I tried it nevertheless, implemented a simple platformer “prototype” and it was two things for me: Fun and Simple. I really appreciate the aspect that somebody else already did a lot of work for me and it was a delight to concentrate more on the actual game than the code around it. I decided to stick with HaxePunk for this game and it’s coming along nicely, I feel confident that this new game will be “my best/most fun game yet”, but It will be challenging as well, so brush up your jumping skills 😀