Original subtitles

In the last video, we set up the animations for our character.

However, as you can see, it still doesn't feel fun to control.

There are some easy tweaks we can do to make the character feel fun in a platformer game.

The first thing is something that isn't quite obvious, but we want to make a 2D or a 2d 3D hybrid game,

and we don't want to allow our character to walk backwards or forward, just left and right.

And in terms of the inputs, this is fine.

We cannot walk back and forward.

However, physics and other things can still push us back or forward, and this is very problematic.

If we built our game around the assumption that our character is always on the same lane.

To demonstrate that, I can just go here and add a sphere shape.

And I want to drag this on the same lane as the character.

Back here.

So the character walks into the sphere, not directly in the middle, but kind of at a side angle.

And you can see that.

Hmm.

Okay.

This is too much in the middle.

A little bit more forward.

This kind of pushes us forward, right?

So you can see I walk in here and the physics push us forward, and now we're off our original lane.

And this is very problematic with the kind of game we want to make.

However, there is a very easy solution and this is something we want to apply not just for the player,

but also for all of the enemies.

So we want to go to blueprints characters, not the player, but actually the action base.

Again, because we want to apply this to everybody.

Open it up.

If it doesn't show the full blueprint, open the full blueprint editor.

And we want to go to the character movement component because again, this is a component made by Unreal

Engine that has a lot of functionality built in already that controls the movement of our character.

And on the right side in the details panel, we just have to look for constrain and it's going to show

us constrain to plane.

And we want to turn this on.

So this will force our character to always stay on the same plane that we set.

And we also have to give it a direction for the plane constraint normal.

Because if it's just 000, it's not going to do anything.

We have to set the direction in which we want to lock the movement.

And you can see here if we for example.

Select this sphere.

We don't want to move on this axis.

Right.

You can see here on the bottom right, the green axis is the one that is moving.

So we want to prevent movement on the y axis the green axis.

And this means here on the y we just have to put in 1.0 and 1.0.

In this case just means active and zero means inactive.

So we don't apply any constraint to the x and the z only to the y.

And this is a very important setting for 2D and 2D 3D hybrid games.

So let's try it out.

I can now go start the game.

And even if I walk into the sphere, well, we have a weird angle again, just like this.

Like before.

And I'm not being pushed forward or backward.

I rather just stop in place and this is exactly what I want, so nothing can push us forward or backward.

We are certain that we're always going to be on the same lane, and we can build our levels around that.

Now we can just select the sphere, hit delete on the keyboard, get rid of it.

And another issue that isn't quite apparent happens if we walk to the edge of the map.

Once we are here, you can see that we don't just fall down.

We kind of awkwardly, slowly go downwards.

And this happens because our character is using a capsule component.

And this is the standard thing that most game engines do because this is good if you go up slopes,

if you go up stairs, it's just the best shape to use.

However, for these kind of retro platformer style games, it feels very unresponsive.

If you just kind of slide down on ledges.

There is a setting we can change easily though.

To fix this and again, we want to go to the character movement component.

And again, we can do this for everybody, not just the player, for all of the action charts and look

for floor.

And it's going to show the.

Use flat base for floor checks.

Variable here.

And for floor checks like this, it's basically just going to ignore the capsule and just use a square.

And this will fix the situation we just had.

So we can just turn it on, compile and save.

And if I do the same thing now.

And now at the edge you can see that we don't slowly go down, but once we hit the threshold, we just

fall down immediately.

And this is how it is in most of these old, uh, 2D kind of games.

This doesn't come without trade offs, though, because now we implement stairs or slopes.

The movement gets a bit awkward, but we don't plan on using them in this game, so it's kind of a trade

off.

You have to think about, depending on what kind of game you're making, if you want to use this or

not.

Next up we want to look at the jump speed and gravity in these Megamind clones.

The jump is very distinct, and you have this jump that you can hold, and you have a lot of control

over which we're going to implement in the next lesson.

But for now, I just want to use the general settings you'd use in most platforms to make them feel

good, and we can then tweak them to better fit this Megaman clone type of game.

The biggest problem right now is that gravity is very low, and it kind of feels like we're jumping

on the moon.

So again, in the action chart, because we want to apply this to everybody, we can again go through

the character movement component.

And we want to look for gravity scale.

And you can see here gravity scale is one.

And we can just make gravity heavier for example by using three.

So the gravity is three times as heavy.

And I can now compile and save.

And if we jump now, you can see that first of all, we barely lift off.

But also we fall to the floor very quickly.

And I like this falling feeling.

However, the jump is too low now, so we have to adjust the jump height to fit this gravity.

And again, in the action chart we can just look for jump velocity.

And set this from 420 to 900.

And these are just some values I found while prototyping.

But I just I was just going through some trial and error, trying out different values and see how they

feel, but this is what I ended up with.

And please use the same while we make this game.

But later on you can change these if you want to and again compile and save.

We can check it out and this is a lot better, a lot more responsive already.

We still have the same jump height we had before, but now we fall to the floor much quicker.

Which makes the game much more responsive.

If you try to move in the air, though, hold right or left while you're in the air.

We actually cannot control our movement a lot.

We're kind of locked into a jump direction once we start, once we lift off the floor and again, there's

an easy setting we can use for this.

Uh, in here character movement component.

We can look for air control.

And air control is a very low right now by default 0.05.

If we put it to one, it would be the same amount of control we have on the ground, which is a little

bit too much.

And usually I just go for a 0.7, which gives us a lot more control than before, but less than we have

on the ground.

Compile and save and let's try it out.

So now even if I jump to the left, I can kind of steer against it in the air.

And this makes platforming a lot more precise and a lot more fun.

And these are the general settings I always use when making a platformer.

But again, in the next lesson we're actually going to implement the iconic Megaman clone jump.