Hey. I'm increasingly getting interested in 2D pixel games. I was wondering if anyone had any useful tutorials, tips, tricks or perspectives on how side scrolling game levels should work.

I've seen games like castlevania that have 4-5 layers of 3D backgrounds that all correspond to what angle your character position represents in the level.

How do you feel about fighting games/old platformers levels that are usually just a backdrop with a few layers of flat background?

Any help would be great! Thanks.  

I like fallout 1&2 levels more  

Posted by Ignatius

I like fallout 1&2 levels more

But isn't that 3D gaming? I'm talking about 2D Mario/Castlevania styles. With pixel emphasis.  

I was making a side-scrolling game not that long ago. Side-scrolling really isn't that difficult, although I can't really give specifics on how to do it because I don't know what you're writing your game in.

The way I achieved it was by taking your level image and initially setting it to screen position (0,0), and then when the player reached halfway across the screen, the image moved left off the screen (ie. x coord - 1). Same principle with the y-axis. Although, if your level's pretty big, you'd be better only drawing the area of the level that's actually inside the screen bounds.

Let me see if I can find some of my old stuff and I'll post some code.  

Eventually I'd love to make a game, but I'm just talking graphics right now. I've seen some tutorials with different systems (such as java), but it's a foreign language to me. I'm more interested in what graphics are best to use for backgrounds. Anyway, in a non-coding way I do think about how mechanics work. My description of the Castlevania backgrounds have no basis, but I do recognize that there are layers that change depending on where you are on the level.