Game Builder Garage [Demo] -- 5. Tag Showdown: Making Platforms

Channel:

YuuGiJoou

Subscribers:

4,230

Published on June 25, 2021 6:00:14 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih2c2XUXIEg

Game:

Game Builder Garage (2021)

Category:

Show

Duration: 6:02

26 views

1

A soapbox to stand on:
twitter.com/yuugijoou
discord.gg/bKT9pRW

---

Lesson 1: Tag Showdown
Step 3 - Making Platforms

But the ground IS a platform!

First off, apparently we're thinking too big... and our person doesn't have a lot of room to maneuver in. The obvious idea would be to give ourselves some more space... but, from a different perspective, perhaps instead the Person could shrink?!

I don't think this will help me at all in my real life organizational challenges... but it's an interesting thought exercise. Mostly, it's designed to make sure you're considering that there are multiple ways to solve a particular problem, and the most obvious one won't always be the simplest or the one that gets things done in the fewest steps.

I'd personally be more curious to know if there are any hard limits we don't know about that makes one solution preferable to the other, but I'm going to suspect that things are at least healthily scalable to the point that it won't matter as much as it might seem like it could.

Also, I'm pretty sure nobody in the audience had that thought, just a moment of stunned silence because who ever thinks about shrinking THEMSELVES to get more space?

Anyway... yep... the ground's a platform. Just grab another one of those! My only input here is that I find it weird that it has us grabbing copies of things we already copied from instead of copying the thing we just made and adjusting it less.

Then again, for the last set of platforms... we did exactly that? Different ways to solve the same problem!

---

One thing I could go on about is the relative lack of precision movement options in a situation like this. No, I don't mean the Joy-Cons themselves... well, maybe just a little. They're LITTLE. That is, the analog sticks are, like most sticks, actually... very small. And limited in effective movement range. Which makes it harder on the software to interpret your actual wants and desires accurately while you push away at that little nub, trying to convey and impose your will upon the virtual space in front of you.

This is the basic weakness of all analog sticks, mind you. Even big ol' hand-devouring joysticks. They're handy for big, grand sweeping gestures... and they capture the nuances better than digital buttons arranged in a plus or a WASD configuration... but there's so much more sensitivity needed for precise control over even a two-dimensional space.

Game Builder Garage does a pretty good job of getting snappy about what constitutes "close enough" for certain applications and purposes, especially your clumsy efforts to point, click, drag, and drop... but I think it's worth consideration that maybe a thumbstick isn't going to be the best tool for the job. (Even if it's the best stick ever and spectacularly tuned for the purpose at hand by as much margin for error as the could possibly program it for!)

Which is why I'm guessing they apparently decided to make it compatible with any ol' generic USB mouse. Man, the Switch's USB compatibility charts are off the... um... charts!

But, if this doesn't sound like a thing you can manage, and I'm kinda presumptuously and preemptively right there with you on this... and hear me out, because this might actually be something of a tired catchphrase of mine at some point. Have you considered... gyro?

Gyro control is an awful lot like a mouse, in theory... although the specifics of how one interacts with it might be a bit askew and misaligned in people's minds. Like any alternate input method, like a trackpad or a tablet or a touchscreen or the mouse's lesser-beloved cousin the trackball or even a traditional gaming controller... there will of course always be a learning curve and familiarity to breed before things stop feeling "weird"... That's kinda like suddenly changing your shoes drastically (can men actually relate to this one, though?) or wearing a new pair of prescription glasses (sorry, all you 20/20 people out there, my examples aren't skewing universal today, I guess!) ...or... um... the feel of a new haircut? ... ... ... no, I don't think that last one really works... but I'm TRYING here!

The real point here is that I've actually used a Joy-Con's gyro in place of a traditional computer mouse, and while I wasn't interested in mussing up the demo's neutral feel as most people would come into it, I think that you'd be surprised just how well the gyro option works... and Nintendo is notoriously persnickety about their gyro implementation, not some third party developer that just shoehorns a set of different input axes into the precision and tolerances of a totally different device's calibration and just expects the players themselves to fiddle with it until it "works"... or doesn't, and they just give up.

So... try it! You may like it, Sam you am! (This goes for gyro controls in general, but I think this is one of the uniquely viable places for it that most people won't actually think once, let alone twice about its merits.)

Other Statistics