I vote for left aligned, it's easier to read while it's typing in. Have you considered a smaller font?

Medusa form is neat but is freezing enemies into platforms even useful with all of the mobility options in the other forms?

If you draw the text out in black or transparent and switch characters to white to do your 'typing in' animation then you can avoid that ugliness where a word starts 'typing in' on the wrong line.

I do like what she's saying though.

If you are doing the programming and are willing to spend some money it may be worth checking out some Unity assets. It looks like there's a couple that are fully-featured RPG setups.

Although, I think I'd still lean toward something like RPG maker and then not do the code, but help him through setting up the game logic himself. If he has an interest in game making this might be an opportunity to show him how rewarding coding can be.

I also want to suggest looking at the limiting but simple (and free/open source) OHRRPGCE. That's where I got my start making games, and it served as a pretty good introduction but probably will seem very dated and not intuitive to a 14 year old today.

Interesting that people have some mixed opinions on the curved path. I've noticed that the curves need to be fairly gradual or it can be hard to judge jumps but I thought that was the only real drawback.

I think in Klonoa the terrain is often narrow platforms, but when you're in a wide open space there's always a narrow path texture following the level's curve so you know beforehand where the character's going to go. I think you might be having mixed results because the player has no way of anticipating the curve. Maybe try a simple path texture along the curve and see if that helps?

Dig the pirate design but I'm curious why their insignia has 3 eyes when their skulls only have two.

Thanks for the feedback on my game btw, definitely glad to hear your curve solution is similar to mine. Crazy that  platformers like this are so rare and we post ours almost within a week of each other.

Here's the initial prototype of the 2.5D system in Unity. It actually does currently support branching paths, but I never bothered to jump on any while I was capturing this  

Basically, it works by defining a ‘forward’ vector based on the closest curve normal to the actor. The actor then has its own ‘forward’ vector, which is constantly being ‘pushed’ towards the curves ‘forward’ vector, by a ratio that depends on the distance between where those vectors are pointing. I was worried at first that this was a fairly fiddly way to do it, but it seems pretty robust. Most of the jittery movements in the demo are actually because the camera is going to be much more complex than the characters and needs a lot of work still.

I am currently using an asset called BGCurve for the splines, but it might be a bit overkill. The nature of a spinning camera in a platformer requires a fairly wide curve or else it gets a little bit funny, so I definitely at least have to put in some hard clamps on that. It may make more sense to have my own purpose build spline implementation, but I haven’t looked too far into that at this point.

Basic platforming and extremely basic non-player AI is implemented and both sorts of actors follow the curves quite successfully. I’ve stress-tested the system with roughly 150 actors and it holds up just fine, but my PC is also fairly beastly so I’m not sure I can use it as a benchmark.

Right now, I'm trying to decide where to go next. I'm considering polishing up the basics and releasing it as a paid asset to help fund the game, since there's actually nothing on the Asset Store like it, but I have stumbled on posts where people try with limited success to implement the same idea. The difficulty lies in how integrated actor movement is to the system, though. It would be tough to add other character actions without knowing how it works in it's current state... so I'm not sure how much sense it would make as an asset.

I think I need to polish up the curve editing at least, or else I'm going to be pulling my hair out trying to make real levels. The camera also needs a lot of work, and currently there are several collision edge-cases that aren't handled properly.

Most Recent GIF:



WIP Concept Art/Poster:

The Decision Engine is a 2D platformer in 3D space where you control a small robot trying to escape a monolithic factory under the watchful gaze of a powerful and ancient machine known only as “The I”. Unravel a dark history in vast locations and learn to bend the factory itself to your will.

Part 1 - "True" 2.5D
Part 2 - Initial Concept Art
Part 3 - Environmental Effects
Part 4 - Technical: 2D Control Along a Bezier Curve

If you are concerned about precision, here's a talk from Unite 2013 about how the developers of Kerbal Space Program solved the issue by defining a threshold distance away from the origin where if the player reaches it the entire KSP solar system moves so that the players new location is the origin. This, of course, is instant and invisible to the player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=384&v=mXTxQko-JH0

KSP has an entire solar system with realistic-ish (I think everything is a bit downscaled from real life) distances between bodies.

Dope. Dig the Monsters Inc vibe. Monsters could definitely use some more visual feedback that they're taking damage when hit, and a puff of smoke or some other effect when their bodies disappear.