Beat'em up Platformer engine... need ideas

[Konidias]

Okay so I'm working on a beat'em up style game but would also like to incorporate platforming elements. The problem I'm having is determining how to actually incorporate the "platforming" part.

Platformers are simple when it's done from a side perspective... X moves left and right, Y jumps up and down. But in a beat'em up perspective like I'm aiming for, X moves left and right, and Y moves you backwards and forwards in depth. So basically you have to fake that third dimension for jumping/platforms.

Here's an example of something similar to what I'm wanting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtnYkEOsPi4&feature=related

At about the 2:40 mark, you can see the player can move the character left/right/back/forwards on the screen. They can also jump around. Then there are platforms the player can jump on to or fall from.

My question is... What would be a good way to implement this using MMF? I've been brainstorming solutions but I'm not really sure I'm going about it the right way and I'd love to hear some fresh perspective on this.

I'm using a custom scripted movement at the moment, which uses fastloops, but I'm open to changing this if there is a more elegant solution.

My idea is that in my game level I'd need to use hidden active objects as "platforms" and then the game would need to detect what platform the player is on, and perform different checks to determine if they can jump to a higher platform or drop down or whatever... But this seems like a really messy and rushed solution which I'm sure I will have nightmares trying to get working correctly.

Does anyone know of any other games that implement this style of player movement along with platforming? I've noticed that it's avoided by most beat'em ups, by just having the levels be barren of any platforms or objects to jump on, and most "elevated" spots in these games are just simple position checks to determine whether the player should be up higher or lower... But mine needs to be more dynamic.

I want the player able to jump up on a box, then drop down and collide with it when they push against it... and even break it or throw it.

So has anyone tried something similar? Anyone know of a more efficient way to do this? Any thoughts?

[Konidias]

Well the scrolling isn't difficult... neither is actually making the artwork for the game. It's really the actual platform movement that is giving me a headache.

Here's a more visual example I put together to help explain my situation:



The little green/brown boxes would be "cliffs" and the little tan thing is the player jumping up the cliffs. This would be SUPER easy to do if the game were just a platformer, but because the player can move towards and away from the camera, it becomes infinitely more difficult.

1. If the player is walking on the ground (white space in my image), they should collide with any of these cliffs if they were to walk into them. That part is easy enough.

2. The player jumps, which means now they need to be able to land on the green area (the higher level) of the cliff. Problem is, the cliff was just blocking the character a second ago. Sure, I can have an event check to see if the player is jumping, and then let the character pass through those cliffs, but what if the obstacle is too high to jump over?

I would need to have a ground collision detector that stays on the ground even when the player jumps. Then I would need another detector for where the player is trying to move to in mid-air. Of course, it's not even that simple, because the place the player is trying to land might be an obstacle... so then I'd need that mid-air collider to be more of a "can the player land where they are trying to" detector. Which is where my head starts hurting because there's just so much there that I'd need to think about.

3. If you look at the example, if the player were to start from the ground and jump up the cliffs like in the example, notice the player's y position has now changed. It gets higher up as they jump... yet technically they should still be on the same depth space. Which means if the player turns around and drops back down, they should be able to land in the exact same Y that they were at to begin with.

Which means the game needs to constantly know what "level" the player is on, so that it can reposition the player if they drop from that level or jump to a higher one... It wouldn't look very realistic if the player dropped off a cliff ledge and didn't have their Y value affected at all.

Anyway, I'm still just trying to brainstorm a good solution for this...

I might have to just make a good 2.5D platform detection system before even bothering with any actual movements or jumping or anything...