So this platformer thing

What is this.. and why?

So, it's.. a game? Platformer, or something like that. I'm on Jestercraft's game development course. The goal is to create (and publish, more or less) a platformer using Construct3. As we started on this, the platformer thing was a definite problem. They're not the type of game that I'm super excited about (though I do love some of them), and I didn't really get much inspiration on what sort of game I'd like to create.  

Initially I played around with platformer controls, doublejumps, powerups and stuff. It was.. fine, but I felt like I'd spend most of the time designing levels and creating animations rather than on.. other game things. I couldn't really figure out the type of characters I could create with my extremely limited graphics skills, and also be happy with. So I turned to opengameart.org. Where I found Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup's tiles, and I thought it might be hilarious and possibly inspiring to create a platformer based on those. 

And it was, it is, sort of. The access to ready-made sprites makes it easier to sort out things to do. But I met a couple of less than suprising issues. No animations - I expected that, but the lack of oomph and feeling that comes with lack of animations is noticeable. I figured I could fix some of that with effects, moving the sprites around and such. So far, I haven't done a lot of that. I had to edit some sprites to remove shadows and such, and some more isometric/top-down ones just don't work. 

The main issue however was that I thought I'd really like to use weapons, have enemies use attacks and such. While figuring that out I thought it would be cool if players and enemies used similar attack mechanics. And it turns out, some of that stuff isn't very convenient to create using Construct3, at least not with my grasp of it. I've spent a lot trial and error figuring out how I can make this work, and I'm not at all happy with it. At the moment, it sort of works, but it's all sort of ugly.

Another huge thing I've been struggling with is the mechanics. How to make the combat feel necessary to start with. Player can just skip everything and run to the end/objectives/whatever. Make the enemies mandatory to kill? Feels a bit forced, but possibly? Adding collisions to them was.. glitchy, though cool for a while. Playing with physics, I had all sorts of problems getting the player movement feel good for this kind of game, though the results were hilarious and would've been cool for a bit faster type of platformer, possibly. At the moment the enemies slow down the player on contact, and they're just fast/dangerous enough that skipping them might be more hazardous than not.

Just getting the enemies feel dangerous while not unfair or cheeseable isn't something I've been able to achieve so far. It's been keeping me from getting on with other stuff, and I've been stuck at this for a good while now. At this point in time I might just have to accept it's just going to have to suffice, and start on actually making levels and other things to make this a game instead of one testing level.