[Tutorial] From Bob to Bound-- creating a jumping puzzle (Patreon)

a couple weeks ago I posted the above. Do you remember it? 

fairly modest, but you can compare and contrast the end result..

it's easiest to work by laying out the area the player can move in regardless. with no other distractions you can easily think about which ways the player can go, which ways will distract them, where the rewards are, and what's easy or too easy to get to. 

there are certain patterns in these puzzles that tend to throw people off. one is a checkerboard line, where everything looks like it stays the same direction but the end of the path is different depending on which way they entered from:

there's also the roundabout, which i use somewhat frequently. a group of three squares at almost any rotation produces a number of different ways to jump of from and can disorient a player as to a correct path:

please understand i am making these names up on the spot.
finally there are a lot of times that i use the sides of cliffs which might otherwise look impassable as a visual obstacle so the player has to look hard at where they can land.

by using only the ground to layout the player area you can tell what the options are at a glance and make changes as quickly as possible. it's best to do that in this stage.

after that, and in this post hence forth, it's basically a matter of mapping it like normal. here's the play by play:

first i replace the isolated bits with platforms, and then i draw out the shape of the peaks. since this is a mountain area i wasn't sure if there would be enough room for the shape i wanted. in truth i much rather would have had the peaks be narrower, but that isn't an option in 3rd gen style mapping. because of how restrictive they are, i wanted to get this out of the way ASAP.

then i start filling in the cliffs within the mountains, with a particular focus on outlining the areas the player will be able to walk. this was done to make sure there would always be enough room for cliffs between all the jumps and player spaces. i did have to make a few changes here-- don't be afraid to.

i expend the cliffs and create a gradient of colors for them. this is to blend the lower areas into a negative space and let the walkable white parts show against the background. if i used the same cliff color for everything on this kind of map, it would all blend together and be very frustrating to try and look at.

plus cliff gradients look rad.

here i fill out the ground properly instead of using demo tiles on the wrong layer. i also correct the cliffs around them to blend in properly, and polish out the ground of all the reachable areas of the mountains

this looks like a big jump but it is mostly tedious repetition. i fill in the bottom of the mountains that the player cannot reach with the darkest cliff tiles available. the purple space above is transparent and will be replaced with a sky panorama.

finally, since there is a place for them to land, i fill in the columnal bases of all the jumping platforms, and decorate the ground with plants and other objects.

finis!