Hey everyone, I have planned out several of my games to be isometric in style and game direction, and in a way that enables the character to jump over some objects/enemies. However, I cannot figure out how to use the collision shapes of platform objects in Buildbox to make this happen. I tried searching around our previous forum, but could not find anything. I also tried looking back to the Diamond Hunters isometric demo, but I could not find anything that helped, even after tweaking it a bit. Please, can anyone help us understand how platform collision shapes enable jumping in an isometric buildbox game?
For anyone reading this and following this in the customers only section... I did play around with the Diamond Hunter isometric game demo that comes with Buildbox, and what I realized from playing around with it was that Diamond Hunter is fundamentally set up differently as compared to games like Ball Jump, Laser, and Blocky Climbers. This last set of games still appears to use a standard gameplay orientation (gravity pulls down; North is up, South is down). So, if you change the gameplay setting for gameplay direction to be something other than its default (gravity pulls down; North is up, South is down), then you can make a game like Diamond Hunters, which is primarily an isometric runner game, but not really a jumping game. If anyone can get the Diamond Hunters game guy to jump over rocks while keeping it at its original gameplay direction setting, I would love to know how - I could not get jumping to function within that game setup. To make a game like Ball Jump, Laser, or Blocky Climbers, all of which use isometric art, it seems you do not necessarily need to use the diamond hunters setup. Instead, you keep the gameplay setting to be like that of a runner or a platformer (platformer setting is working better for me than runner setting is right now for my isometric game testing). Also, you can play with the global gameplay settings by using the sliders, but that's still not at the core of what makes the gameplay possible. What you must do is adjust the collision shape and orientation property of the collision shape of the isometric art that you bring in -- for your objects (platforms). I have had some luck here by doing that, and I am still playing with it to optimize it and get it working. I may try strategies for layering invisible objects and their collision shapes with the platforms objects if need be. Right now my problem is that my character keeps speeding up on the collision shape of my platforms that have these settings -- however, this is allowing my character to jump, so that is good. One problem at a time...
Its different for every game, as what you need to do depends on the particular style of the game. In Laser! for example, all the blocks have a normal square collision area. It helps to set the directional on the collision area upwards so you can jump through the bottom of them but then land on top of them. Every time the character lands on a new block and needs to make a jump in a different direction there is an invisible gameplay action that changes the jump force attributes permanently (just use a really big number like 1000000 seconds). Laser just uses a normal downward pulling y-axis gravity. The jump force is set that the character perfectly jumps from one platform to the next. Set all the bounce settings to 0 and use some high platform friction to keep from sliding. It takes a lot of setting up to make sure everything lines up perfect with the character and object collision boxes. Which is one reason I requested that we can duplicate characters and objects (in the Feature Request thread) so we don't have to recreate these perfect collision boxes every time we want to add a new character of different color block. Of course nobody else has given me any support on the request although I'm sure anyone that has spent some time getting fancy with build box would appreciate it... I know so much about laser because I recreated the style in my game Froggy! (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/froggy!-pond-adventure/id1023198329).
@stevinz, great explanation, thanks. I plan to use this to setup a test doc for this kind of game, much appreciated. I don't think the lack of support for your feature request is because people don't think it's a good idea, it's more because, like me, they don't understand how cool it would be to have because they haven't attempted this style of game yet. Now I've read your post, I can certainly appreciate your feature request. I think we'd all welcome any part of BB we could have as a modular system we could duplicate. This would save tons of time and that's what we're all after, right
