Upon opening the Platformer Demo, you'll be confronted with the game stage. Let's click the Game Mind Map button (top-left of the screen) to check it out:
The Game Mind Map is where you can change the user experience of your game. It's also how you navigate to each area you'd like to edit.
This type of interface is known as a node-based interface. Essentially, it's an interactive flowchart. The individual blocks are called nodes. Lines come into nodes on the left and exit on the right. Let's take a minute and go over the nodes for this example game.
- All games start with a
Start
node. Think of this as a splash screen where you can show your logo, and add a loading bar (the status of the game loading into memory) while the rest of the game's loading is completed. Once loading is finished, the user will be taken directly into Level 1. - The
Level 1
node, you'll notice, is blue. Blue nodes are worlds and green nodes are user interface (UI) nodes. You'll also see that the...