I'm putting together a 2D phone game design where the main character can crawl on the floor ceiling and walls. Also, the character can jump from one wall to the other, or from the ceiling to the floor (and vice versa) as long as the two surfaces are close enough to each other. I'd like to have all of this possible through 5 keys (4 directions + 1 jump). So if the player was on the floor and pressed jump he would jump up, if on a left hand wall, he'd jump to the right, right wall jump to the left, etc. Is this technically possible on any phone platforms?

1. You did not explain how do you want the character to jump between adjacent planes: (from floor/ceiling to a walls) – you only mentioned jumps from opposite but parallel planes (floor to ceiling). Although I can figure out couple of ways on how to do this – you should be more specific.

2. You talk of a 2D game, which is either a side view platformer or a top view runner, or at best some sort of isometric view. In any case – even if you could do this in pure 3D – how do you imagine to provide a view of 4 !!! simultaneous orthogonal planes? Although, once again, I can see a way of doing this – it is not clear what is your implementation.

3. Very few phones today can process simultaneous button presses – so if a player needs to hold a direction and a jump button at the same time – you will have very hard time finding a device that can do this now days. Once again it is not a showstopper – but your system interface needs to be though through.

Hi!

Also don't forget the limited memory on phones.

Nokia Series 60 phones are not the problem, but if you plan to make the game also for nokia series 30,40 phones, keep in mind that you have 64kb max. size for graphics, sound, code and other resources and approx. 150kb of heap size for the graphics you load for your current scene (2 byte per pixel).

McMc

So I just lost my whole reply because my password didn't process. So I'll try again.

It's a 2D sidescroller.

The character would not be able to jump to adjacent walls (i.e. from floor to right wall). Rather he would have to walk from the floor to the wall. (i.e. walk from floor to right wall). So if he was on the floor and needed to get to a floating platform that was only accesible from the left wall, he'd have to walk to and up the left wall and then jump to the platform from the left wall.

The design would not call for double input. Everything would be controlled by 5 keys.

My main concern is memory. I don't expect it to be played on all phone platforms, but some would be okay. I just want to make sure that it's not too far reaching or ambitious. Thanks for your thoughts.

I presume then, you are talking about having a larger then usual set of animation sprites for your character (all those transitions and different views on the character ) due to his all-wall walking abilities.

It all will depend on how detailed/large your character sprite is then. Even if it is 30% of a screen height – I think you can make it work. I will require more memory and might be slow on low end systems – but it is doable. If you look at some latest platformers – they have lots and lots of sprites animated on screen. So I think you can do it.