We have posted an article on our site about how you can make a 2D platformer and use a physics engine for collision detection. http://www.defold.com/doc/platformer

The article is for beginners, but others might find something of value as well. We wrote it in the context of our gamedev platform Defold, but the code and methods should be easily ported to other platforms or languages (we use Lua). Hope you find it useful, let me know if anything is confusing or plain wrong and I will correct it. Thanks!

Thanks for sharing this. While stuff like vectors and such go over my head, I think a lot of people will find this useful.

Thanks! Even though vectors can be hard to grasp at first, I really recommend you keep trying. There is so much fun stuff you can do with them, in many different areas of gamedev.