New Platform Game Starter Kit

Announcements
1

Hey All,

Today we’ve released the first update to our Platform Game Starter Kit.

I think the starter kits are really important for new users. Learning new APIs is difficult and time-consuming and one of the best ways to get a feel for how to use an API like the PlayCanvas Engine is to see it in action. This is the reason we’re always release the source to all our projects.

The starter kits are particularly designed to be full of useful snippets of code. For example in the Platform Starter kit we’ve got: trigger volumes, collision detection, player input, script communication, enabled/disabling Entities and loads more little bits and pieces which you will end up using in your games.

But it’s not just the code that is available for you to see here. All the assets in the Starter Kits are free for you to use in your games too. That means you’ve got a fully animated 3D character in the form of Playbot to use while developing your games. Hopefully you’ll find this really useful when prototyping and getting started.

I’m particularly pleased with Spike and Punch, Philippa and our concept artist John did an amazing job realizing those. Feel free to build tank games using those (nudge nudge, @max)

Anyway, we’ll be working on more starter kits too. Please let me know what you think of the platform game kit, and what other genres/starter kits you would like to see.

Here’s some screenies of Spike and Punch:

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2

The starter kits are a great and probably the best way to get started with this engine, it has helped me a lot! :smile:

3

Thanks for the feedback, @Detzt! Any suggestions for new starter kits to add in the future?

4

Hm, the Platform Game covers almost everything, but adding different input types (mouse, keys, touch, gamepad) would be an useful addition.

It also took me quite a while to understand how materials and assets work, but thats probably because I never worked with models before.

Oh and somehow confusing is this “context” element (e.g. context.root), which is passed as a parameter to pc.script.create(). I couldn’t find anything about that in the documentation, only some scripts where it is used.

5

I would really like a kind of ‘third person action’ starter kit, u know with a camera that zooms in over the shoulder when u need it to, tracks back/zooms out when u move forward, doesn’t get trapped by obstacles or lost behind a wall etc.

Maybe I’m just after a camera script rather than a full kit, though it would definitely help to see a ‘best practice’ third person setup to start with for run-and-gun, fighting or stealth games.

6

Starter kits OH yeah! I like!!! :smile: