As we’re leading up to the first public showcase of the Platformer Starter Kit, we thought we would take some time to walk through some of the features of the Kit, and how to use them.

The Kit provides a lot of options for customizing your player character.  But what do all of the options mean, and how do we use them?  Let’s take a look and see all of the options we have available for customizing the movement of our player character:

• wallJumpEnable - Whether or not the player should be able to wall-jump
• wallJumpFactor - How much weaker a wall jump is than a normal jump.  Generally between 0 and 1, though values greater than 1 will result in a wall jump that is more powerful than a standard jump.
• wallJumpHorizPushoff - How hard we push off from the wall horizontally on a wall jump.  Higher is a larger pushoff.
• wallSlideSlowdown - How much slowdown / friction we have when we are sliding down a wall to slow our descent.  Between 0 and 1 — 0 is completely sticky, 1 is no friction at all.  Set to 1 to disable wall slide slowdown.
• airJumpCapacity - The number of air jumps that the player should be able to make mid-air.  Set to 0 to disable air jumps.  Set to -1 to provide infinite.
• airJumpFactor - How much weaker an air jump is than a normal jump.  Generally between 0 and 1, though values greater than 1 will result in a wall jump that is more powerful than a standard jump.
• airJumpHorizSlowdown - How much of one’s horizontal velocity is left after air-jumping.  Can be used to make air jumps more focused on height than on distance.  Set to 1 to disable this option.
• airJumpRechargeOnWall - Whether or not one’s air jumps are recharged on a wall slide
• horizAccel - How quickly the player accellerates on the ground.  In pixels per frame.
• airControl - How quickly the player accellerates in the air relative to the accelleration on the ground.  A factor generally between 0 and 1.  1 means no difference between ground accelleration and being in the air.  0 means no air control at all.
• slowdown - The slowdown we have when we are trying to stop or change direction
• jumpSpeed - How quickly the player leaves the ground when jumping.
• maxHorizSpeed - The fastest that the player can move horizontally.

As we’re leading up to the first public showcase of the Platformer Starter Kit, we thought we would take some time to walk through some of the features of the Kit, and how to use them.

The Kit includes several tile sets for you to use in your game, but how would you use a new tileset?

Here are the steps:

• Include the image in your Actionscript project
• Create a tile sheet for your tileset
• Create a new tilemap (.tmx) that uses your tileset
• Add the tilemap to your level file
• Add tile collision information for the tile map
• Test the new tile map in-game

Let’s look through each of these in turn:

As we’re leading up to the first public showcase of the Platformer Starter Kit, we thought we would take some time to walk through some of the features of the Kit, and how to use them.

The Kit includes one fully animated character, but let’s say you have some other character art that you would like to use.  How would you include it?

Here are the steps:

• Include the image in your Actionscript project
• Create a tile sheet for your sprite
• Update your player character template to use the new sprite indices
• Test the new sprite in-game

Let’s look through each of these in turn: