How to Make a 2D Game

[gamecreator]

I know it may be counter-intuitive but one of my thoughts is to use Leadwerks for a 2D game. I'm thinking either a platformer or a game like

. The question is, how do you implement a 2D game in Leadwerks?

 

My first thought was to create two massive planes, one on each side of the characters, which prevents them from moving in the Z plane. That, combined with resetting all rotations to face the correct way each frame should solve most problems. But what if some characters are wider than others? Do I put down multiple planes? This seems a bit awkward.

 

The second thought was that maybe Newtown's already thought of this. I didn't see this in the Bodies wiki but perhaps there's a way to set it to ignore Z movement. Or, is there a way to detect Z movement and apply a negative force to counter it?

 

Any thoughts and suggestions are appreciated. This is also my first post on the forums so hello all!

 

Oh, finally: how do you access the two locked tutorials on the wiki? I sent Josh an email a few days ago but I guess he's busy.

 

Thanks!

[macklebee]

you might be interested in this post at Newton

 

also to get access to the locked tuts, just enter your SDK registration key as the username and password

[Canardia]

Modern 2D games have always a little 3D effect in them too, look for example how Little Big Planet was made.

It's basically a 2D platformer, but you can sometimes move 1 meter in Z-direction too, for example when climbing a stairway up.

That can be done in Leadwerks without any special tricks, you just make your level 2 meter deep.

[gamecreator]

Thank you. From macklebee's post, it looks like I'll need to investigate 2d joints, as I'm very likely not a good enough programmer to modify the newton code. Lumooja, believe it or not, I've thought of Little Big Planet before this but that just seems a step more difficult, as in something to implement after one figures out how to do single-plane 2D with a 3D engine.

 

In addition to all this, I've used the wonderful pmask collision library before. It's strictly 2D but I can see the possibility of not using Newton and implementing it instead. It would be some extra work, somehow analyzing the 3D world and creating a 2D collision array from it, but it could be done.

[Rick]

You could do everything in textures which would give you 2D. CreateTexture() & DrawImage() would give you everything you need for true 2D. Then for collisions you could just use bounding boxes.

[AggrorJorn]

Games like Trine and Shadow complex are also good examples for this.

[Volker]

This question was asked in the old forum here.

I limited the movement to 2D with the code posted there which works fine.

For the rotation I found no similar way, so please let me know if you solve it.

To limit the rotation I'm using two big boxes between which my ship moves. I had to adjust the body damping, so that

the boxes don't decelerate the ship to much.

But what if some characters are wider than others? Do I put down multiple planes? This seems a bit awkward.

Yes

All my ships will have the same z-size to avoid this trouble. Especially in Multiplayer

using multiple planes/boxes.

 

Julio (the newton maker) wrote that he is working on something to limit movement to 2D.

But I don't know how far he is.

Btw: Which newton version is LE 2.3 using?

[Rekindled Phoenix]

Hey that's my post! That never was resolved... at least for me. The team completely redesigned the project because of this hastle.