ABSTRACT
In the process of deciding what game I should walk through the creation of in this chapter, I asked a lot of my developer friends what they would fi nd most useful. I even posted a public survey for people to cast votes on a variety of game types. I was impressed that, by a huge margin (the runner-up had about half as many votes), the winner was a platformer-style game. When I asked other devs why they thought this was the case, the answer was simple, albeit daunting: The platformer is an example of many different game design and development principles all working together at once — level design, animation, keyboard input, physics, collision detection, and basic AI. So, in the name of democracy, that’s the type of game we will create in this chapter.
