Hey all!
Some of you may already be aware, but recently we launched our very own Construct Team Twitch channel!
I'm very excited by all of this, streaming is something I've wanted to try for ages, but this is also going to give me a chance to finally learn how to use Construct properly!
What does streaming have to do with Construct?
Well. Let me explain what we'll be doing with the Twitch channel.
The current plan is to do two streams per week — one on a Tuesday, and one on a Thursday. Thursday's streams will be all about playing games that have in some way, shape or form, been made with a Construct engine. The game I chose to start with is Iconoclasts - and I am loving it so far!
Tuesday's streams are going to be development focused streams. I'm going to be learning how to use Construct 3 by making a game, and every week I'll be doing a bit of that development work on stream! I've always had a hankering to make my own Pokemon game - I've been a Pokemon fan since the days of Red, Blue and Yellow, and this is the perfect opportunity for that! Okay, so it won't be actual Pokemon for obvious reasons (my game file is currently named Definitely Not Pokemon), but it'll be an RPG in the Pokemon style. There'll be some kind of wild encounter/capture system, turn-based battles and so on. This may take me a century as I figure out a) how Construct works and b) how on earth I'm going to translate all these mechanics into events, but I hope you'll join me as I muddle through everything. I have an A4 page of mechanics I want to figure out!
I will probably be building these mechanics in smaller projects first, before figuring out how to put them into the main game, so I'm hoping this will give me content to use for some associated tutorials and bits like that.
I plan to use this blog to show off some of the things I can't do on stream - like the sketches I'm doing for the game's artwork or the sheer amount of notes I've already scribbled. I want to share my process so that you can see what I'm doing, and maybe figure out if some of it will work for you. Or y'know, just tell me I've done everything wrong.
Talking of sketches, I do have a couple for you already. Anyone who was tuned in on Tuesday should recognise this first one. It's the piece of paper I had in front of my face as I built my very first tilemap!
Please excuse my rubbish colouring.
This is my first sketch for one of the districts in the opening City for the region. The currently unnamed city will be split into four districts - Residential, Entertainment, Shopping and Research. Each district will be its own layout, around 36x36 squares and the four fit together to form a larger square. I'm aiming for a GameBoy Advance style with the art, so my main inspirations are the Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and Fire Red/Leaf Green Pokemon games. So all the tiles are 16x16px.
I thought I'd start with residential because it would probably have the least detail out of all the districts, which means fewer tiles for me to design! The player will live in one of the three red-doored buildings, and the rival/friends will probably live in the same building - that's how they met, backstory, blah, blah blah. I have got this layout mostly built in Construct 3, but some of the tiles do need a bit of tweaking. I'll share a tidied up version later - you can watch Tuesday's stream back on Twitch if you're curious. (That'll also give you an idea of what the streams will be like!)
My next task is to finish off designing the Entertainment district, which has four unique buildings for me to figure out! I have a basic idea for the theatre (which will probably be the starting point for the whole game!) I now just need to figure out how to translate that into tiles. The squared paper helps immensely with this - I can see exactly which bits of the basic design need to be in which tile.
Anyway, I think I'll leave this blog there - I don't want to make this first one too long! The plan for the blog is to make it a weekly thing, possibly on a Friday that way if something cool happens in either of our streams I can talk about it! So I might even do another quick update this Friday, you lucky ducks! It might be a good opportunity to talk a bit more about the game's world, lore, what I plan to have in it etc.
Remember, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 13.30-15.30 (UK Time) I'll be live on Twitch. Hope to see you there!