Can the player make the jump?

Whenever you make a game that involves the player jumping over gaps, or up to a higher platform, making sure the jump is possible is paramount. So how do you make sure the player can make the jump?

One way is to measure jump distance, the player can jump 100 over a gap, everyone make sure to keep your jumps below this! However measuring how long or high a jump is, is cumbersome. Which is why we have "jump helpers".

A jump helper is a visual representation of a player character at the extremes of the jump.

In the above picture, the leftmost character is placed in the position the player is supposed to jump from. The figures on the right represents where you will end up. The lower of the characters represents where you will end up without climbing, while the upper character represents where you will end up if climbing. This gives a very easy way to answer the question, will the player make the jump? Yes, the player will be able to make the jump quite comfortably, but it will require a climb unless you manage to time your jump extremely well.

There is also the situation where you want to jump up, we also have a jump helper for this.

Again you place the jump helper where the player is supposed to jump from. The lowest of the figures is the jump point, with the middle figure representing the jump height. The top figure represents how far the player can get while climbing. We can see that this jump is clearly doable.

Using these we can verify that all jumps we expect the player to do are possible.

While so far we have only showed these actors being used to verify that a jump is possible, it is also possible to use them to decide how long a jump should be. However the primary purpose for us is to verify that the level works without having to test it manually every time we change a jump.