Godot platformer templates: three different things go by that name

The most common thing tagged as a platformer starter in Godot is a 3D movement base. Godot4 Basic3DStarter is exactly that: a third-person character controller, a follow camera, an animation script, one world scene and a grid material for blocking out geometry. It has no collectibles, no enemies, no checkpoints and no goal, because it exists to be a prototyping base. If you searched for a platformer and pictured a side-scroller, this is not that, and no amount of editing turns it into one.

The second shape is the 2D side-scroller: a character with gravity and a jump, tilemap collision, one-way platforms, hazards and a level. This is what most people mean by the phrase.

The third shape is a metroidvania, which is side-on too and is otherwise a different genre. Darkcom's metroidvania project is built around that structure, with jump, dash and attack on the player, a health display, map data, connected levels, enemies and a menu flow. Ability-gated exploration is a progression design, not a movement design, and a starter that has it is solving a different problem from one that does not.

Deciding between the three before you download anything is the cheapest decision on this page. Converting between them is not a conversion, it is a rewrite.

Every platformer starter ships a working jump. Almost none ships a jump that will suit your game, because the feel of a platformer lives in about a dozen values and they are all tuned for the demo the author built.

The arc first: how fast you rise, how much faster you fall than you rose, whether there is a moment of hang at the apex, whether holding the button gives a taller jump, and where terminal velocity sits. Then the horizontal feel: acceleration, friction, top speed, and how much control you keep in the air. Then the landing: whether you keep momentum, whether there is a recovery frame, whether the camera reacts.

Then forgiveness, which is the part players never notice and always feel. Coyote time lets you jump for a few frames after walking off a ledge. Jump buffering registers a press made just before you land. Corner correction nudges you past a block you clipped by a pixel. A starter may have none of these, and adding them is a small amount of code and a large amount of difference.

This is the honest reason a platformer starter saves less time than it looks like it will. Writing a character that moves is a day. Making one that feels good is the project.

A starter gives you one level, often one screen. A short platformer is dozens of screens, each one teaching or testing something, ordered so the difficulty climbs without spiking. That ordering is design work no template contains.

The supporting pieces show up quickly once you start building rooms: moving platforms, crumbling platforms, one-way floors, spikes, doors, checkpoints and the rules for what respawns and what stays broken. Check which of these a starter already has, because each one you add yourself is a small system with its own edge cases.

The camera is a design tool in this genre rather than a technicality. A deadzone that lets small movements happen without the view shifting, look-ahead in the direction you are running, a slower vertical follow so jumps do not swim, and room-based framing if your level is built in screens. Most starters use a simple follow camera and leave this to you.

The temptation is to take a clean side-scroller starter and add exploration later. It rarely works out cheaply. Ability-gated progression needs a world that knows which paths are locked and by what, rooms that remember their state after you leave, a map the player can read, and a save system that holds all of it. Retrofitting those onto a linear starter means replacing the level loader and adding persistence to almost everything.

A metroidvania starter has made those decisions already, which is its real value. The controller in it is not better than the one in a plain platformer starter. The structure around the controller is what you are adopting.

Stage Engine works from the other direction. You build the world by hand in the builder, and Director 1 writes the GDScript inside your own project, including the movement values you keep asking to change. There is no template picker in Stage Engine and none of the projects described above can be opened from inside the app, so this is a different starting point rather than a longer list to choose from.

It is a desktop app for Mac and Windows with Godot bundled inside, and the game runs locally when you press play, which matters in a genre where you will play the same jump two hundred times. Building needs an internet connection; playing what you built does not. The download is free, Indie is $10 a month and Pro is $50.