I'm starting to make a platform game styled loosely like FPA World 2, only with more fighting in it and I'm having trouble getting started past where all the tutorials on the internet stop. They all show how to make a character move and use gravity and hittest to keep him/her/it on the ground... I don't want to pay money for cartoonsmart.com or anything like that but need some help. I have run into a few problems thus far...

1) Lives, meaning I had the head of the character representing the lives. I found this tutorial for lives http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Game s/Gaming_-Mirza_Ha-902/index.php but the reason it doesn't work for me is because I have a camera following the main character rather than the whole stage moving and the camera remaining stationary, so the way I have it if I were to use that tutorial then the 5 life symbols would be floating in the middle of the stage... not ideal.

2) When the character falls off the stage I have a hotspot for the game to go to a "retry" screen but I'm not sure what script to use for the retry button. As of now I just have it sending you back to frame one, but it'll just go back to where the character isn't on the stage, so I need the level to refresh somehow.

3) I don't have any idea how to make enemies, so far I keep finding tutorials for tile-based platformers and so the enemies are oriented via arrays, and that doesn't work if you have no array.

4) If you press the up arrow on the keyboard down, the character continually jumps up. I'd prefer the character to jump once and the person playing the game having to repeat pressing the arrow in order for the character to jump again.

5) I'd eventually like there to be items to acquire and power-ups, and I'm sure when the time comes I can find a tutorial but I'd like to fix those other four problems first and if anyone wants to enlighten me on this 4th problem that'd be fantastic also.

Thanks for reading all of that and any help you can give :)

Hey everyone. Just letting you all know that I just made a website for Bowser's Kingdom; you can get to it here bowserskingdom.com. I decided it was time we have a website devoted to this series rather than having it on the website for my webcomic... a webcomic that I haven't updated in a very very long time. So anyway, let me know what you think of the site.