As Unicopia’s my first game, I purposefully wanted to make it as simple as possible. What could be easier? Make a basic platformer, throw in some unicorns and rainbows, and then bingo, I’d have a game of bouncy goodness.

Eight months later, things have progressed. Gems, keys, doors, an annoying ghost, and a plethora of enemies and levels. Unicopia’s loose bunch of ideas is pulling together nicely into a game, and while a lot still needs doing, the end is now in sight. However, no matter how much progress the game makes, one thing that still eludes me is getting the jump feel right.

After reading some excellent articles, like Rodrigo Monteiro’s brilliant Guide to implementing 2D platformers, adding in some coyote time, some jump buffering,  and after a lot of tweaking, I managed to get the jump feeling pretty good.

Most alpha players reported “nice controls”, and those that play precision platformers weren’t having any problems at all. But a few people were finding the jumps hard. Some were finding it challenging to land on smaller platforms, others were struggling with the longer jumps, but the general gist was “jumps are difficult”.

If Unicopia was meant to be a precision platformer, I might have leaned into the difficulty, but it’s a small, simple game, and I’d been targeting a more casual audience. More importantly, the jump is the core mechanic in platformers, and if players aren’t enjoying the jump then they’re not enjoying the game, period.

 After reading David Strachan’s GameDevPlatformer on how to smooth out jump difficulty, I pulled on my coding mitts, ready to jump into the player class. I was a little nervous as the player contains the most concentrated code in the codebase, and then it hit me, or rather, as I watched my son playing a level, it hit him. There it was, right in front of me. As he jumped, I saw the slightest, almost imperceptible bump as Cornelia’s head glanced off the bottom of a platform. It wasn’t enough to significantly change the jump’s trajectory, it wasn’t enough for the player to notice, but, checking with my son, it was enough to tweak the jump feel.

Checking the collision box for Cornelia, it was clearly great for picking up fruit and gems, but not so much when jumping under platforms.

 A couple of quick adjustments–including squeezing the sides to align with her hooves–and the tighter collider now gives just enough jump headroom to really soften the difficulty.

Although, it's clear there's a way to go to refine the jump further, in one minor tweak, Cornelia's jump has come on leaps and bounds. While I’ll also need to revisit all the game’s other colliders to check for other  oddities, hopefully once I've added some of David Stachan’s advice,  then Cornelia's gymnastics will be worth jumping and shouting about.