platformer – Webdevils

If you haven’t played Canabalt, you should give it a try. This is one of the games to define the single button endless runner type games. the original was made in Flash. There’s also an IOS and Android version. I hear the Android version is better with different worlds and things.

Essentially the gist of the genre is that you are running forward avoiding obstacles. things get tougher as the game progresses. There’s lots of variation. I’m linking to an article here by the author of Canabalt talking about what went into making Canabalt and the decisions for different screen sizes, and game mechanics. Very informative if you wanted to make a similar game.

http://blog.semisecretsoftware.com/post/44317538718/tuning-canabalt

Tiled is a desktop application that helps create tile maps from sprite sheets. Ceramic Tile Engine is a library for use with Corona that displays the data from Tiled. Two great tools that work great together. The demo provided with Ceramic has a really nice platform game example.

Tile maps are larger images created from smaller tiles. By using, and reusing, small tiles large environments can be created. Since a single image containing a few small tiles takes up much less memory than the image created with the tiles tile maps are more efficient.

Tiled is an application you can use to create tile maps. Tiled is generic and not tied to any other application or programming language. You’ll use it to build maps and export a text file describing your map. Usually this will be in the Json format.

Here are a few links:

Discussion on the Corona SDK forum

Ceramic documentation on GitHub

Ceramic Tiled Engine on Github

Video demo using Corona SDK and Tiled together