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Sensei1

Member

From: The land of saunas

Joined: 2015-02-16

Posts: 1,112

Sensei's tutorials, tips and stuff

Hi! Lictor still hasn't made his EE tutorial so I thought I'd give it a try. I'll just put random building tutorials/tips and my thoughts here, cheers!

▼General Tips

Choosing the right world size
A daily reminder that world sizes matter! Most of the worlds on EE are squares, but before you go and buy that square think twice!
The type of worlds many people make are platformers going from left to right, for which a wide or ultra wide worlds is a lot more suitable than a square. For a world with mainly up/down movement, I recommend the tall or vertical world!
Square worlds are nice and all, but they're only useful if your gameplay will have a lot of both horizontal and vertical momevent. The biggest world we have is a square though, so if you need a lot of space, go for it!

Creativity and originality
The two words everyone loves and uses. An original world is a good one right?
I really like worlds with original ideas, but I know that there are people who enjoy traditional art + gameplay worlds the most. You don't have to be super creative when making worlds, but using the same ideas over and over again isn't too good either. (I say that while many of the most popular worlds of all time use the same old boxed minigames )

All of us have had the feeling when we've run out of ideas. Some of us are sad because they know they're not as creative as other people, but worry do not! Creativity isn't something magical we're born with, in fact it can be learned and practiced. Actually most of us are quite darn creative, we just don't know how to use our creativity. Here're some tips for getting ideas:

- Keep your eyes open and seek for ideas from your surroundings in your daily life
- Try to get free from old habits, things don't have to be done the same way as before
- Don't decline "bad" ideas before actually thinking about them. Even bad ideas can have something good in them
- Creativity techniques

Yes, there is something called "creativity techniques", which are basically techniques for getting ideas fast. They're quite fun and definitely worth a try! Here're some:

- Combining existing ideas to create new ideas
- Making existing ideas simpler
- Making existing ideas more complex

The word "idea" used here can really mean anything. You could combine the idea of climbing a tree with the idea of a city. That'd be a world where you climb up a tree house city? Sounds interesting to me!

When talking about EE, "stealing" ideas from other games is quite effective. Some of the best gameplay ideas I've seen on EE are in worlds, which are remakes of other games!

▼General Gameplay

Two basic rules of gameplay
Gameplay for a world is like melody is to music. It is the soul of the level and the people who come to your world are usually looking for gameplay. So gameplay is important!
How to make good gameplay? I have interesting news for you: There's is no real "good" or "bad" gameplay! Anything can be good if the one playing is enjoying it. I think when building worlds the most important thing is that you enjoy the world yourself.

Here's step #1 for good gameplay: Recognize what you like and dislike!

Go play some worlds you like and worlds you dislike, and try to find out what you like/dislike about them. I myself rarely create difficult worlds, because I don't like playing difficult worlds myself. In other words, it's impossible for me to create a hard world that I would recognize as a "good" world. With easy worlds however, I can feel if I'm enjoying the world or not.

Step #2 for good gameplay: Play your own gameplay, and check if you like it or not! ...if not, edit it!

Seriously, if you don't like your own world, what's the point? If testing your world feels painful, something is probably wrong. If that's the case, try figuring out why you're not enjoying your own world and edit it to be better!

Small gameplay ideas/motifs
Ever thought of creating gameplay based on simple motifs? Many minigames are made by repeating one idea. An example from Lictor's EE Legend:

This minigame uses the idea of bouncing from an arrow wall. You can see that you have to to bounce two times in a row to get enough speed for winning the minigame.
A motif can really be anything from a single jump to a complex... thing. Get creative! Also, the motifs don't have to be repeated of course. You use just one motif or put different motifs together in a minigame too.

I think if Lictor had made his own tutorial, he'd have talked something about motifs. I never even thought about them before I heard it from Lictor you see!

Consistency in gamplay
I once asked Theditor to teach me how to make minigames. The thing I best remember him say was that gameplay needs to be consistent. What this basically means is that you should avoid gameplay that requires pixel perfect movement. An example minigame with bad consistency:

You can build this to your own world and try it out, it feels horrible (To me at least). In order to win, you have to do such a perfect edge jump that it ends up being luck based. Luck based gameplay is what we're trying to avoid when making our gameplay consistent. So avoid too perfect jumps and such.
There might be people who enjoy luck based gameplay, but I'm quite sure most do not.

Minigames
When you hear the words gameplay and EE, the word "minigame" comes into your mind, right? Most EE worlds divide their gameplay to small sections, which we call minigames. I think this is actually quite weird! When I started playing EE and creating my own little worlds, I didn't make anything like minigames. I just built - gameplay, I guess? Then I found a friend who showed me how minigames and hook jumps work, and that's where I said goodbye to my childish creativity.

No but seriously, why do we always make minigames? We have the option to make continuous gameplay like in most platformer games, but instead we make these seperate challenges. Maybe it has something to do with the gameplay being so hard that it'd be too painful not to cut it into smaller sections. Who knows!

I'm just here to say that minigames is one way of building a world, but it's definitely not the only one. You don't need to build your gameplay in the form of minigames for it to be good!

▼General Art

Two basic rules of art
...are the same as the rules of gameplay. Find out what kind of art you like, and see if you like the art you're creating yourself.

Minimap art and Ingame art
When I talk about art, I usually mean ingame art, because I don't really care about minimap art. A year or two ago it was the other way around, and I'm not sure what caused the change.
There are people who think ingame art is more important, people who think minimap art is more important and people who think both are equally important. I feel like EE is kinda growing out of the "Minimap art > ingame art" phase, since people seem to pay more and more attention to ingame art.

It doesn't really matter which one you like more in the end. If you enjoy worlds with good minimap art, you should decorate the minimap in your worlds too. If you don't care about minimap art, then don't care about it!

Even though I don't care much about the minimap art in worlds, I do think that the way people make minimap art is kinda unique to EE. A good looking minimap is of course more fun to look at too!

Making your world look more interesting
This is something that I often forget to do when creating a world. I create an art style, and then create the whole world using that style. There's nothing wrong with this, but with simple styles the world might start looking a bit boring if everything looks the same. I like creating simple, "minimalist", art in my worlds, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be interesting to look at! If we want our worlds to have very good art, the art should be interesting by itself too (Without gameplay). Here's a simple candy room I created:

It looks good, but imagine the whole world looking th same. It would be quite boring imo. To make it more interesting, just add something more to it! I'm really into bridges so I added a bridge there:

As you can see, the art became much more interesting and attracted another player to come to look at it!
I'm not saying that we should add a huge amount of decorations and stuff to our art, but adding some new elements might make your world feel more alive.

Combining art and gameplay
Combining art and gameplay will make world seem more like one game, instead of just having gameplay with some art around it. So for example, instead of climbing up blocks, you could be climbing up a tree. It kinda gives you a story, a reason why you're doing what you're doing. Of course the art you can depends on the theme of your world, and in some cases (eg. boxed minigames) it's best to just climb blocks instead of a tree.

▼(Art) Houses and Buildings!

As some may know, I really love houses. I like drawing houses and I liking building houses on EE, and I know there are people who want to build houses too.
Here are some tips for house building to make your houses look amazing!

What makes a house?
Houses are usually something people can go inside of. Thus they usually have a door, which is pretty much all a house needs for being a house. Also, you can build your house from the kind of angle where the door won't be seen, so even the door isn't necessary! A flat square doesn't look much like a house though, so it's better to add some elements houses usually have. Here are some examples:
-Doors
-Windows
-Roofs
-Balconies, terraces
-Mailboxes

You don't need to use all of these, usually just one or two of these elements is enough to make your house look like a house. The fun part is that you can combine these house elements with pretty much anything else! Add a door and windows to a tree and you'll have a great looking tree house! Add a mailbox next to a cave and it suddenly looks like someone's home!

Inside or outside?
There are 2-3 kinds of houses on EE:
-Ones where the player is inside the house [Inside houses]
-Ones where the player is outside the house [Outside houses]
-Ones where the player can be either inside or outside [Combination houses]

The first two are different in many ways, the biggest difference being the size. You will need a bigger house if you want to be inside it.
With inside houses you will have the fun of creating rooms, but outside houses often fit your world's art better. You can of course combined these two kinds of houses with portals for example.

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So far I've only added a few thoughts, but I'll add other stuff later!
Latest added: World sizes, Houses

Gosha

Member

From: Russia

Joined: 2015-03-15

Posts: 6,211

Re: Sensei's tutorials, tips and stuff

I am too lazy to read this, but your pictures have dark borders, tahts why they look "pro". Wooted

Myst

Guest

Re: Sensei's tutorials, tips and stuff

I am too lazy to read this, but your pictures have dark borders, tahts why they look "pro". Wooted

I'm lazier then u :v

Koya

Fabulous Member

From: The island with those Brits

Joined: 2015-02-18

Posts: 6,310

Re: Sensei's tutorials, tips and stuff

What about challenges that are consistent but require pixel perfect motion? http://everybodyedits.com/games/PWcYSh0gk_bkI

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Thank you eleizibeth ^

I stack my signatures rather than delete them so I don't lose them

Freckleface

Member

Joined: 2015-04-02

Posts: 1,364

Re: Sensei's tutorials, tips and stuff

Nice tutorial! I hope this helps players when they are making worlds, because I am not a big fan of box minis and rpgs.

Also maybe you should add that levels should have a gameplay theme. You dont want most of the level to have a certain gimmick and then halfway it suddenly changes.

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F

Sensei1

Member

From: The land of saunas

Joined: 2015-02-16

Posts: 1,112

Re: Sensei's tutorials, tips and stuff

I added spoilers to make it look less like a huge wall of text.
I also added some more tips. I started talking about houses, because houses are lovely