Ever heard of Guardian Heroes by Treasure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByxHeJSkv54
Three planes for the player to use, combos and air combos.
I will make the three planes invisible objects that the player jumps up to and down to to give the illusion of traveling in to the screen and out of it. So my question is can an object be made passable and then not passable? So when the player presses q the player jumps up but does not come down until the player presses z.
Also, are there any games currently using parallax scrolling?
The flowlabs physics are perfect for floating air combos and I feel that I can make more than just a platform game.
I am thinking of calling the game
“Adult Pixelated Hybrid Fighting Terrapins - Super Pro Alpha Ex Zero Platinum Mashup Remixed Edition”
Catchy name I thought
Is there a way to turn collision off for a short amount of time for a player?
I have been testing enable and disable but that also disables the jump. I require three types of jump.
One is a jump that will not go high enough to reach the plane above it, activated by pressing up.
One is a super jump activated by pressing down then up, this can exceed two planes in height but must not be allowed to have contact with any of the planes other than the one it was launched from. I don’t know how to do that either.
And the third is a jump that will go up one plane or down one plane by pressing either q or z. To go up the player must pass through one plane from under it but not be able to pass through from above.
If you watch the players in the video above you will see exactly what i mean.
I could really do with some help with this. My game is located here http://flowlab.io/game/view/58998
The numbered planes should stretch across the whole screen but don’t for testing purposes.
Guardian Heroes looks great, I hadn’t heard of it until now.
Interesting game you’re making. One method it might be worth trying to achieve your gameplay would be to extract the y co-ordinate of the character.
You could use filters (less than/greater then) to stop the character at the different heights. If you’re on the ground floor and jump the extractor co-ordinate numbers would decrease as you are moving up, you could set the filter to look for this and then lock your player into position on the next rung up.
At the same time you could reduce the size of the sprite with easing perhaps creating the desired illusion of moving further away.
This would also mean you could put in platforms for visual purposes only.
It will be a bit fiddly and need trial and error to get it right.
Maybe Grazer and Mhx have an alternative method, hopefully they will chime in.
Hey, let me ask you something.
Lets say you have 3 roads.
Turn off gravity and make those 3 roads like an RPG game,
put them as not solid, on game layer 1. Put players on game layer 2, so they walk above. Put the bottom halves of barrels as solid on game layer 1, so you walk into them from the side, but you phase over them when 1 road down. Put the top halves of barrels as Not solid, and game layer 3, so you walk past and behind them. I used to make a lot of RPG games.
The jumping can be simulated as moving up and then back down with maybe velocity. Here’s an example:
Spacebar — number 10 — velocity Y.
Timer 1 second connected from spacebar pressed — number -10 — velocity Y.
Timer 1 second connected from 1 sec timer — number 0 — velocity Y.
This way, you go up for a second, down for a second, and stop Y movement dead with no sliding.
Now you may be wondering “I don’t want my player to walk up the buildings, since gravity is turned off”
Simple. Make a 2 part character, the bottom is 1 block and solid, the top is 2 blocks, but not solid. Still allow collision for being hit. Now connect the top double to the bottom 1 block. The 1 block can be invisible, so long as you have it on layer 1, and the double on layer 2. Use attach to connect the 2 sprites.
Now for the buildings, make the bottom parts of buildings solid, layer 1, so the top half of your sprite walks in front of them, but you can’t walk above them, because the connected solid square won’t go past.
Have these building blocks “disable” when spacebar is pressed, and “enable” after a 2 sec timer. By the time you come back down, the barrier will be solid again. Now, you need to remember to have an On/Off switch for the players Up and Down, so when you hit spacebar, you can’t still walk up while you are jumping. Have spacebar turn the On/Off to Off. Have a 2 second timer connected to the spacebar hit, turn it on. You need 2 On/Off switches. 1 for Up and 1 for Down. Now you can still move left and right midair, but not up and down.
If you followed and understood all that I typed, that’s a good start for a Double Dragons, Battle Toads, or any basic sidewalk brawl style game. Good luck 
What muddy said about locking Y position would be fine, if you wanted to hover around at an approximate level, until you got hit, or needed to jump. Then you would need to unlock the Y position, in which gravity would pull you back down 'til you touched the ground and could jump again. Locking Y doesn’t work at all well with simple moving platforms. It was a good suggestion, but not as practical as RPG style movement.
I need some time to digest this information and picture it in my minds eye. I know I have jumped in at the deep end but that’s how I achieve my best work. Thanks for your detailed replies.
If I were to remove gravity is there a way to simulate it being on on demand?
Treasure are the masters of sprite games and you should check out Gunstar Heroes on the SEGA MegaDrive to see what I mean. Guardian Heroes was among one of the first games released on the Saturn and was an instant classic one of a kind. I have not seen a game like it since. If you have a 360 I advise you to download it. I just remembered that they also made Radiant Silver Gun too and I think a Jap only N64 game that looked pretty damn good although I never got to play it. Time to break out an emulator me thinks.
Sure you can make gravity turn on and off. Make an Always connect to a -35 Y motor. You can have the Always connect to the IN of an On/Off switch, so you can have certain things turn it ON or OFF.
The only problem is, You want 3 lanes right? Gravity pulls you down, til you are standing flat. You can’t walk up or down. Games like these are literally RPG games, but without Up or Down facing sprites. Gravity is more for a game like Contra.
Gravity is required for the air combos really. I think what I need to do is not allow the player to effect on the other lanes. The lanes are fairly close to each other so jumping is blocked. If you are on the bottom lane and you do a super jump it will take you past the other two lanes.
I think I will avoid the lane issue until I have a main sprite and an enemy that can interact. As I say, I am in the planning stage but I can see I have to produce some assets before I can plan any further.
But how will it save you any time? I thought you wanted a progressive fighter, not a platformer fighter.
Lets not worry about that for now.
So I cam creating the player now and collision is a problem so I have come up with an idea.
The actual player will be made up of several objects. One object per animation and none of the animation objects will have collision.
The user will control a small invisible object that I will call base for now. Attached to the base object will be the animation objects that appear and disappear when required.
The collision boxes will also be invisible and attached to the invisible base object.
In these images the green box represents the base object, the character is one frame from the animation object and the red boxes are the hit collision objects.
Will this idea work?
Objects don’t connect to the sides of other objects. They connect in a stupid way actually. I tried to make a hat, and it stuck to my players feet. I made the hat 2 blocks tall, still stuck to my feet, with the 2nd block below me.
Damn… That’s it then, project over until that is fixed. There is just no way around it, these sprites are big and require separate hit boxes.
I am going to have to make a very basic game so I might clone hack slash loot.
Come take a look http://flowlab.io/game/view/58998
The sprite is not in the correct place when walking forward but that is easily fixed. The object behind seems to be attached to the sprite. I think I may have attached the wrong way around though as the object (base) is attached to the sprite. Both objects have collision turned on but I need the sprite to have no collision and for it to stop when the base object collides.
Also, it works sometines, tap forward forward to run.