Top Down

Top-down games are games with a bird's eye view. A few such games are Legends of Zelda, Stardew Valley, and Civilizations. These and more make up a significant amount of the games that are published.

A few better top-down games are SCP:World's End (feel free to add more to the list). The Flowlab Tutorial does not go over how to make these, so how do you make one? The first step is creating character controls. There are generally two options: Ship Controls and True Controls. Ship controls is where you can turn left and right, with the accompaniment of forwards and backwards movement. True Top-Down controls is where each of the four arrow keys moves the player in a different direction. The first step is to understand how to make any movement at all. The keyboard or button that activates the movement, when deactivated, should lessen the movement speed to 0. For more detail, look at the picture to the right.

As soon as you have made one movement for each side of the player, you can now add in items. Most items/weapons are used with some sort of emitter, so that is what I will reveal how to do. Go back to your movement scripts and add a new number to the "Down" output. This number should correspond with the angle of the direction (ex. 90 for right, 180 for down). Attach that number to an emitter block, located in Components. Put the "Out" output of the new number blocks into the "Angle" of the emitter. This will change the angle of the emitter to correspond with the direction you are going. Next, add a new keyboard block and set it to Spacebar. Attach the "Down" output to the "Emit" input.

Finally, exit the coding and make a new block. This will be your sword, shield, block, item or bullet. Turn on "Movable" and turn off "Affected by Gravity." This allows you to actually shoot the object. Go back into the coding for your player. Press the emitter and select the type that is the projectile.

Now when you press play, you the character can both move and shoot! Fiddle around with the sizes and power of the projectile to fit your needs. Great job, you just finished the Top-Down Tutorial!