Building a 2.5D Platform Game
Platform games are another classical game type. They first appeared around 1980 as console games — like the famous Donkey Kong (1981) and Nintendo’ Super Mario Bros (1985). It is hard to believe that early games were single-screen movement only. Later side-scrolling became possible and even four-directional movements and scrolling.
From 2D they moved to 2.5D, using 3D graphics but 2D movements. And around 1995 full 3D platform games started to appear. Newest to the family are exiting VR jump and run platform games.
Thus platform games remain an active genre, beside consoles, mobile devices seem to be perfect for some jump and run actions.
Let’s have some fun and build one.
To get started we create a new 3D project in Unity and link it to a Github repository. We can then add our basic placeholders using cubes for the platform, a capsule for the player and spheres for the collectables.
In the next article we will create a character controller from scratch.
