 Portal, Mirror's Edge, Ori and the Blind Forest, Super Mario Odyssey, Mega Man, Shadow Knight, Celeste, Vest, Super Meat Boy, Spyro, Cannibal, Pitfall, Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider and even Temporum. These are very different games with all sorts of unique mechanics, controls and stories. So what they all have in common? You're in the 80s, the Golden Arcade Age. There's a shop near your neighborhood with all sorts of arcade games. We were entering this shop and there are lines of people waiting to play it. What are they playing? Ah yes, Dokencom, the first true platformer in history. Although Space Panic had a similar setup, it was Dokencom that really showcased all the features that would define this genre. Here's where our journey starts. So let's take a brief look at this revolution released by Nintendo in 1981. But which features are we talking about? What made Dokencom such a good game back then? Well, jump and run. Yeah, nothing too fancy, but note that back in that time this was completely revolutionary. We had a character, no, three characters, an antagonist, a protagonist and a princess. We had to move around jumping over barriers trying to reach the far goal using these platforms to progress. There we have it, the core of platformers. Jump, run, environment with obstacles and platformers that helped us move around and progress towards the goal. But note that here all the action happens in a single screen. All these elements appear at the same time, even the goal. And here, my friends, is when we start to enter in the depth of platformer games. You'll for sure have already heard about this genre many times. After all, it's one of the most popular ones, but it gave way to a ton of subgenres. Back in 1982 Pitiful for Atari revolutionized the genre, presenting the idea of spamming the level layout throughout 255 interconnected screens. So when the character reaches the left end of the screen, the game will load the respective area. And if the character goes back to the right, the game will load the previous screen. There is an interesting talk from David Crane, game designer and programmer of Pitiful, where he explains how they managed to store and process all these different screens in just 128 bytes, not to mention all the sprites in game logic. Atari was a fun place to work, at least it was while Nolan Bushnell was there. I stayed on at Atari a little while after Nolan left, developed a couple more 2600 games, Outlaw, Slot Machine, one cartridge that was Canyon Bomber that also had depth charging. This was a remarkable feat. The video is in Brazilian Portuguese, but all David lines are in English, so it definitely worked taking a look. But loading new screens, even if they share some kind of continuity, was still playing the game into a single screen. Then again, Nintendo brought another revolution, Super Mario Bros. with what we call side-scrolling levels. Although this feature came before Super Mario Bros., for instance with Jump Bug and later Backland, Super Mario Bros. was the one responsible for mixing parallax background which adds depth to the games, with side-scrolling levels and a good story with memorable enemies, power-ups and so on. From there, there was no stop, the side-screw era began. Lots of games implemented this new feature, which then became a core feature for games to come and still is a main feature in most 2D platformers. But just jumping and running from side to side stopping being enough, players were the main thing in something else, and designers gave it to them. Fairly enough, some side-scrollers and even the very Donkey Kong itself already gave weapons to characters. In Super Mario Bros., technically Americans shoot fireballs, but that's not what a game is about. It's 1987, golden era of science fiction and its robots. Robocop just launched in the theaters, an android mixing a man and a robot with guns. It was born, the masterpiece that would later become a never-remarkable series. We're not going to talk about how Megaman X series just revolutionized later in the 90s with air dash, wall jump, vehicles and more. Let's just appreciate this very first Android Android. Yeah, shooting yellow lemons on the robots, now we're talking. With jump and shooting, we entered in the era of fast-paced action, with games that started the genre known as jump and shoot. With screw-able scenarios, the ability to jump, run, shoot and more, designers thought that it would be a good time to invest into more complex storytelling. Some games already had a good story, but most of the content wasn't really uncovered to gameplay elements. So it was time to make players explore the secrets of a level, the ins and outs of the magic world they were playing. Game designers used it the new advance in technology to create bigger levels where the obstacles between the starting point and the goal weren't just a matter of running, shooting, jumping, no. Players would have to figure out how they could live that place, unlocking new abilities, fighting new weapons, coming back and forth to explore everything in that world. In August 1986, Metroid introduced players to the premise of mixing and escape the room with platformers. With a non-linear exploration of the planet's zips, players would have to collect power-ups and new abilities to allow simmers to reach areas previously inaccessible in progress through the level. At almost the same time in September 1986, Castlevania was released. Following a similar premise of exploring a level with an open-ended approach, the developers of Castlevania told the story of Simon against the monsters of Dracula Castle. Due to being released at almost the same time and with a heavy focus on non-linear exploration, open-ended worlds, upgrade system and platform mechanics, these games gave Bertrand what we refer nowadays as Metroidvanias, a subgenre of platformers and action-adventure. You might already notice that I didn't mention any 3D platformer until now, right? That's because I don't like them. But let's be fair, adding a new space dimension can be super hard, and some games exceed when they manage to do that well. Let's take Super Mario 64 as an example. In 1996, some genres were exploring 3 dimensions already, like first-person shooters, racing, flight simulators and others. All these genres have their merits, but making a platformer demands a lot of precision, spatial awareness, responsiveness and tons of other fast maneuvering factors. But Super Mario 64 proved that all that can be achieved with good and smooth controls. And a decent camera. From that, 3D platformers implemented many of the features that once were gender-finding. Open-ended levels, detailed level exploration, physics and abstract puzzles, then don't rather even give a gun to Lara Croft without making the game a 3D running gun, but rather a 3D action-adventure. That's part of the reason why I don't engage too much into 3D game development. People just assume that your game must have some groundbreaking features by default, so you have to innovate with something else on top of implementing all the standards and a decent camera. This all makes 3D games very expensive to make, especially with tools like Grow, where we don't have really good assets to save some development time, like Unity's first-person and third-person character controllers. Now that we already have a good sense of what are platformers, some subgenres and what makes them so amazing, let's make one. This is the first video of the Let's Make a Platformer series, sponsored by my patrons. In this series, we are going to design, develop and publish a platformer game, so subscribe to the channel and turn on the notifications so you don't miss the upcoming videos. That's it, thank you so much for watching, keep developing and we'll see you the next time.