Posted November 19, 2025 by Ludonauta
#tutorial
Having at least one platformer game in your portfolio is fundamental. But how do you start making platformer games?
Platformer games are the number one genre that comes to mind for casual players when you say you make games. They're instantly recognizable and universally understood.
More importantly, they help you understand almost everything about making games: physics, progression, animation, combat, win-and-lose conditions, environment design, level design, menus... The list goes on. If you can make a solid platformer, you've proven you understand the fundamentals of game development.
Most of the big indie successes from the last decade are some variation of a platformer game, from Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, Super Meat Boy, and FEZ to the recent hit Silksong. Platformers are flexible and give you the minimum setup to expand into more adventure or strategy-oriented genres.
I started my journey making an RPG. I don't recommend that you do the same. It's way too overwhelming, especially trying to manage attributes and resource management in strategy elements.
It was when I made an infinity runner (which is a sub-genre of platformer), Moon Cheeser, that I really made a fun game with an actual core loop that allowed me to finish and publish it. The game even got some community mods. It was pretty fun.
As soon as you get your head around the basics of game development: input handling, object instancing, and object interactions, you can start making a platformer game to put everything into practice.
And of course, after finishing developing the game, you should publish it here on itch.io or on Steam if you feel really confident. You are going to get a lot of feedback to improve on future games.
According to Video Game Insights, in the last 365 days, 13,547 platformer games were released on Steam, with a median for the least sold genre (casino) being 785 units sold and 29,243 units in the most sold genre (action).
So, besides being very saturated, there is still a lot of room for platformer games. Who knows? Maybe you'll find a great opportunity.
Let's make a quick tutorial on how to create the basics of a platformer game using the recipes available in the Platformer Essentials Cookbook. For that, I'll be using the Platformer Essentials Game project files, which are available for everyone who got the book for $19.99. This is a project that adds visual assets on top of the core features presented in the book. We are using PixelFrog's Kings and Pigs asset pack for that.
Let's start by creating a new level scene where we have some TileMapLayers, the PlayerCharacter2D (which is an implementation of the Moving Character recipe), a Camera2D, a ColorRect to use for fade in and out transitions, and some Node2Ds to organize some objects.
The very basics is to first define what is the level's goal. Here we are going to ask the player to reach the door, which will progress them to the next level. In that sense, platforming is the core skill we will demand from the player. For that, let's use an instance of a Door, which is basically a concrete implementation of a Portal2D, one of the book's recipes. For now, we can set the Next Scene Path to point to the level we are making, since we don't have other levels ready yet.
Let's create the level layout using the EnvironmentTileMapLayer and move our Door to the layout's point of interest.
Now, let's use the PlatformsTileMapLayer to add some Pass-through Platforms, yet another recipe in the book. These are basically tiles with collision shapes within the Pass-through Layer. I'm going to add them to some ceiling and floor pits to entice players to use the pass-through mechanic. I'm also going to add some solid platforms to entice the player to jump.
Now, there's a huge vertical segment near the end of the level. Advanced players can try to use wall jumps to reach the top-most part. But I think we can use an elevator for that. Using a Switch2D, we can contextualize it as a narrative descriptor, like another Pig that is helping the player. The player interacts with him and he brings the elevator.
Cool! Now that we have an ideal journey for the player, let's add the incentives. In this game, we have crates that once broken drop diamonds and we also have bombs. We use the Hazard recipe to allow the player to break the crates and to allow the bomb to deal damage on the player. So we are going to reward players for going into places we want them to go and since this is more of an action game, we are going to use bombs to test the player's reaction time.
Now, players can't just guess picking up diamonds is positive, right? We are going to ensure that right at the beginning, there will be a special Diamond that will trigger a dialogue explaining that it is valuable and players should pick them. For that, we can use a Label and an AnimationPlayer and trigger the animation using an InteractiveArea2D, yet another recipe from our book.
As Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman state in their book Rules of Play, conflict is intrinsic to every game. There must be an opposite force trying to prevent the player from achieving their goal. So, let's add some enemies using the BumpingEnemy recipe. To make them wander around easier, we will create some pits and add them inside them.
And there we have it! A complete platformer level using the Moving Character, the Portal, the Path-follow Platform, Spawner, Hazard, Pass-through Character, Bumping Enemy, Switch, and Interactive Area recipes. This was done within 2 hours, including some specific setups like the Diamond's dialogue, the Elevator's animations, and the level scene setup.
That's the power of having reliable, battle-tested implementations that you can reuse over and over and improve them on each new project. As you use them, they get better, offering more accurate results, and allowing you to make games faster.
The Platformer Essentials Cookbook is currently under a revamp and will become the most complete Godot 4 platformer development resource out there. As soon as I finish porting all the recipes (currently 8 are ported already so we are halfway there), it will get a price bump to $29.99. So it's the perfect time to get it with the current $9.99 price. Don't miss the chance to get the Platformer Essentials Cookbook today and start building your portfolio!