Where to start making a 'smooth' platformer?

[the_Quinn]

Hi, I'm pretty new here - both to LOVE and to the forums.

A friend and I are trying to make a platformer game, but a really nice and smooth one (think the smoothness of Limbo - a brilliant game), but I'm looking at thousands of entirely unrelated tutorials and I've gotten overwhelmed.
I've found a few tutorials, but they seem to deal with tile-based art and stuff, rather than what I'm after which would be image or vector based I guess.

Sorry if I'm incoherent, typing this on not very much sleep ._.

Thanks!

[rokit boy]

Try:
HardonCollider, fully functional, tiles or polygons
AdvTiledLoader, loads maps from program called Tiled, can be used with HardonCollider, tiles only
bump.lua, a small lib for minimal collision detection, tiles?
Box2d/love.physics, fully functional but very hard to use, tiles and polygons,
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anim8.lua, for animations, useful in platformers
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TEsound, a sound lib
stateful.lua, useful for menus and other gamestates
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A decent class library for working with different objects.

[OmarShehata]

Limbo was made with Box2d I believe. Which is the love.physics module. If you don't have any experience with box2d it might seem a bit difficult. If you won't require any complicated or realistic physics in your game then implementing box2d would be a waste of time. In fact it might be a bit of a hindrance as it's usually pretty hard to adjust physics simulations to an exact feel for your game.

[Jasoco]

Yeah, I'd say using just Box2D would take a lot of tweaking to get it working perfectly. I believe Braid was also done with Box2D and possibly Aquaria. (But that's not a platformer unless you count it as being a completely underwater one.) They use it mainly so you can have levels made up of just large images thrown on a canvas and rotated rather than a straight grid-based map system.

The grid-based system will be a lot easier to do. I've made a few unpolished ones myself and am planning on a third unpolished one soon at some point.

I would suggest starting there small because it'll be really hard to get Box2D acting like it should. By default Box2D is very floaty and not realistic at all. When you design your own physics you have better control over the world.

Tiles would have a collision flag that tells the engine whether it's either not solid, solid, or one of many collision mask types like ramps which can vary depending on the detail you'd want.