Hey everyone, just a brief(ish) message before I detail the new lesson.

Let's Build a Platformer! has undergone some serious restructuring. From Lesson 3 on-wards, the .ZIP files will only contain the project file and no PDF to accompany it.

The reason for this is it was taking me anywhere between 30 to 40 hours to create a single lesson, including setting up the project, sourcing all the screenshots and writing and editing approximately 5000 words. While I do really appreciate the donations that came in the last couple of weeks, the amount of work involved in producing this series in its original format was just too much for me to handle. I simply couldn't sustain the amount of work required and support my family at the same time (let alone make my own games, too).

Rather than just ditch the endeavor or start charging for it, I have decided its best to drop the written lesson PDFs and simply provide a fully commented project file of Let's Build a Platformer! over time. This will mean the lessons won't be as theoretically detailed, but it will still provide a lot of practical knowledge and most importantly; LBaP! will remain FREE!

From here on out, in each of these Lesson devlogs, I will give a short description of what has been added to the project and what to look out for in the various scripts or asset directories. 

Each Lesson will build on the project in some way, slowly expanding in size with each new release. Please download the lessons in order so you aren't greeted with loads of new content and succumb to information overload! 

Lesson 1 and 2 will remain as is to help absolute beginners jump in without any prior knowledge. Beyond them, its up to you to read the GB Studio Docs or ask questions in the GB Studio discord. If you have a question relating to a lesson specifically, ask away in the comment sections of these devlogs and I will do what I can to help.

And finally, there are loads of generous people out there looking to commit their own time at no cost to help the community such as the generous volunteers at GB Studio Central. LazyDev is also creating his own Let's Build an RPG! course for free, too! Check it out if you want to learn more about creating RPGs with GB Studio. If you do have the means - keep donating to myself and people like LazyDev to help us keep ticking away.

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Lesson 3: Implementing and Tracking Options

In this lesson, the Options Menu has been completed, and will send the player to either a 'Credits' scene or an empty 'Intro Cutscene' scene when 'Start Game' is selected.

Peruse the Trigger scripts of the menu in detail and the On Init script of the scenes. Comments have been added to provide more information throughout.

Check out the projects build folder to play an up to date ROM of the lesson (game.gb), or play in your browser here on itch.

In the next lesson, I will be creating a short cutscene to go over some dialogue tricks and explore the use of parallax in a scene to create more dynamic movement.

Happy coding!

- Tom (Gumpy Function)