Of course, it's been a long time since I first read the guide to implementing 2D platformers on the Higher Order Fun blog. I believe it's been part of my research on how people implement slopes together with the MC Kids talk on implementing sophisticated platformers on NES. So somewhere around 2007.
There's still a number of topics I haven't implemented in GEDS that are discussed in that post, including ladders, refined slopes and one-way platforms. So I finally printed it all so I could take the time to read it quietly and take notes on what was neat and what needs more thinking. That was over 6 months ago.So unfortunately, the toughts aren't fresh in my mind anymore. I'll have to read them back *too* before I can talk about it more.The blog post presented different ways to implement a platformer. Tiles-based, of course, as it was de-facto technique used on virtually all 8-bit and 16-bit consoles that used tiles-based hardware (and still an efficient technique on page-flipping hardware), but also vector-based levels (only mentioned, though) and bitmap-based. I wish there was more being said about the techniques used with bitmap-based level modeling, as I believe it was the technique used in Fury of the Furries. I also know for sure it was used in Lemmings for levels up to 5 screens-wide (that would be about half the conventional RAM available on an IBM-PC, btw). Since the storage space on floppies was limited, levels weren't stored as a large bitmap, though: they...