Yesterday was a day off so i had time to advance on the mechanics of the game. I found some tutorials about making a platform game on gdevelop that covered the main issues, at first it was confuse but i decided to go on myself instead of downloading a template.
Surely downloading the template and working on it should save precious time. But i'm pretty sure it will not be so much learning by doing that, so... this is what i did from scratch.
In a paper i wrote the mechanics, goals, and gameplay, there is no plot at this time, so i think it will be developed right on the fly.
Variables where decided and engines needed.
After reviewing the variables i expect to use, (always on the development i found i had to use more variables) I started declaring variables on the start. This is something used in almost any language, so it's a good practice even using an engine to try and declare them at first.
After that i started to make the main scenes that should work as templates for the more.
I've found there should be some procedures that should be generals for the most of the scenes, so these should be external events to call them everytime i need them.
This is a practice i did ton of times on rpgmaker, instead copy/pasting the events i used random numbers to call specific behaviors inside a common event, this way the coding size is reduced and you only need to make changes in a place to see them changing all over the game. For programmers this is the object oriented programming so, as i'm planning to emigrate from engines to code i should use, and abuse this feature as much as i can.
At this point i have declared 2 external events:
Hud_scoring > To update always the number of items shown in the hud.
Objects> These are the rewards found on the maps, Think of them as Mario Bros's coins, but they are surprise items: you don't know what is inside until you open them. So far the system is working, after a few mistakes done, but is already working ok and i'm pleased with the results.
Before doing this external events, i need to draw at least a platform where the character lands and the gifts where, so i opened my classic graphics gale and made a 32x32 tile of grass and soil... in game these detailed items does not look as i wanted, so maybe i should edit them later an made them lesser detailed.
I used my own chara template from rpg to make the player animations and checked they run smoothly, again, i have to edit later on the graphics, because 2.5 D looks rare on a sidescroll view... details... details...
Next step is working on enemies and make the rest of the tiles i will need,
.For enemies i will need an external event again. At this time the player can walk from one side to the other, jump and collect the randomized items... not so bad for a half day of work in a new engine.