Re: The Wiki
Reply #18 –
Looking at the current Tutorials, it's pretty much all RPG-related stuff, and there's quite a bit of redundancy. Four battle system tutorials? I understand everyone has their own style and advice, but if everyone's focusing on the same thing, it's less helpful than if there's people making totally different sorts of tuts.
Speaking as a programming and Sphere novice, I'd love to see many small, highly-specific tutorials that one could piece together to get a game off the ground, as opposed to larger game-specific tutorials ("here's how to make an RPG" "here's how to make a platformer"). Such tutorials might include...
• Sidescrolling Movement Tutorial
(Includes gravity and jumping)
• Autoscrolling Movement Tutorial
(ala a space shooter)
• Tile Movement Tutorial
(Don't forget to make it dynamic, to allow various tile sizes)
• Disabling 8-Way Movement Tutorial
(ala the original Legend of Zelda where you can only move in one direction at a time)
• Running Tutorial
(shows you how to add a run button to side-view or top-view games, and different kinds of running -- hold to run infinitely, press to get a short boost ala Secret of Mana, a boost meter ala Star Fox)
• Jumping Tutorial
(shows how to do double-jumping, wall-jumping, etc. in sidescrolling games)
• Shooting Tutorial
(shows how to make characters shoot simple bullets, either in the same direction the character is facing, or in a fixed direction, whether it be fixed by the game (you can only shoot up) or by button press (different buttons for shoot up/down/left/right) and how to have those bullets do things like destroy Entities)
• Map Changing Tutorial
(shows how to warp characters from map to map, including how to make a screen exiting/entering animation)
• Heart Meter Tutorial
(shows how to make a simple three-heart meter, along with how to make objects/events remove those hearts, how to make the game kick out to a game over screen when you lose all your hearts, items to increase your maximum hearts, items to refill your hearts, etc.)
• Death Hazards Tutorial
(shows how to add instant-kill tiles/objects to any sort of game and bottomless pits to sidescrolling games)
• Treasure Tutorial
(shows how to make pickups like gems/coins/etc. in games, where when you touch them, they give you some score or money or whatever)
• Powerups Tutorial
(shows how to make simple timed powerups such as double jump height, more powerful bullets, invincibility, etc.)
• Moving Platforms Tutorial
(shows how to make simple moving platforms for sidescrollers)
• Platformer Enemies Tutorial
(shows how to make some simple platformer game enemies, including enemies that mindlessly walk in a straight line, enemies that won't fall off platforms and enemies that jump, both those that jump constantly/randomly and those that jump when the player is nearby)
• Overhead Enemies Tutorial
(shows how to make basic enemies for an overhead game, including those that wander randomly, those that track the player's movement and those that shoot projectiles)
Since the Sphere editor is pretty esoteric, it'd probably also be helpful to have a basic "here's how to make X resources" tutorial. It's not at all obvious how to actually make tilesets (I had quite a bit of trouble figuring that one out), or use the different layers in the map editor. Things like that.