Retrospections from a n00b.

First off, I'd like to apologize if this is in the wrong section of the forum. Secondly, I'd like to apologize if this gets a bit rambly. Considering what I intend to post about, I can forsee it getting pretty wordy by the end.

So, I'm potatoeater, a relatively new person to the whole Construct 2 thing. I played around with the original Construct (I think it's called Construct Classic now?) a few years ago - I had heard about it while looking around the interwebs for game-making tools like Klik and Play and Game Maker. After hearing quite a few good things about Construct (mainly that it was free; something pretty unheard of for these types of things back then), I decided to download it and mess around with it. I was pretty amazed and tried to do things with it, even posted on the forums at times (back when it was much less fancy and shiny), but due to some issues (I think it was with a binary object or something) I ended up dropping everything and eventually stopped using Construct. Then real life happened and I wasn't been able to do anything related to making games for a while.

Recently, however, I've been trying to get back into this hobbyist game dev shebang. So I did the obvious; google things. I saw things like Game Maker Studio, Unity, Unreal Development Kit, Multimedia Fusion 2.5 and finally Construct 2. After weighing the options the options and playing a bit with all of them, I decided that I'd try to tackle Construct 2 seriously first.

I then grabbed the free downloadable version of Construct 2 once I decided that I'd try to make a game with it. After reviewing the specs and limitations of it, I decided on remaking an old, obscure game into a browser-playable version with multiple characters and an online leaderboard - because hey, those things should be possible with it, how hard could it be?

So after two weeks of futzing about with the unknown that slowly became known (truth be told, this should have probably taken less time, but hey, I never said real life stopped happening), I managed to pop out something that could be called a game. It's playable at the following website:

takehane.ml

My personal anecdotes about my experience making it are as follows:

• Construct 2 is pretty great. There's no other way to state this. Even if it does lack a bunch of features that the others take for granted, its simplicity and ease-of-use may convince me to, should I decide on one of the others for more serious projects, get a full copy of this and keep it around for lighter things. It's that good, in my opinion.

• I'm surprised at how informative the community is. Not only the quantity, but the quality of information available is very adequate. Multiple times, I'd have an issue with or a question about Construct 2 and I wouldn't even have to ask about it on the forum. I could just google it or search the site/forum and it'd already be answered concisely, with even easy to understand examples at times.

• I was shocked by the 100 event limit. Not that it was 'so low' or 'practically unusable' or anything like that. I was shocked by the fact that a complete game (or rather, the game's core) could be made by only using about a third of that. So much is taken care of by objects and behaviors and whatnot, it's astounding how much you can just leave to Construct 2 and not have to worry about it. Compared to something like The Games Factory, where the behaviors were finicky at best and infuriating at worst; the reliability of Construct 2's behaviors was very appreciated.

• Also regarding the 100 event limit, I found it both an adversary and an ally. While true, it did prevent me from working further on the game when I had barely gotten a functional stage working, it made me go back to my event sheets and try to work out how I could do things more efficiently or how I could do things with less events. A sort of forced optimization, I suppose. And a newfound appreciation for all those development tricks all those programmers of ages past used to get things running on older systems/consoles. After hitting it a few times, I finally got to a point that I was relatively satisfied with - escalating difficulty, multiple playable characters with differing gameplay, scoring, timers, an online leaderboard, power-ups and an acceptable level of polish; all in exactly 100 events. Sure I had to cut some things I planned to do, and sure I could have maybe optimized it further (not sure how I can get animation into less than 3 events though, haha) but as I said, I'm satisfied with what it is right now.

• Regarding events as a whole, I was also shocked by learning that it's not particularly the creation of game logic that eats through the number of events you use, but rather the polishing of the overall game. Making menus do cool things or having fancy animations during certain circumstances are probably the most blatant things in that regard.

• Third party plugin support is probably the best thing ever.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied by Construct 2 (the free, limited version, even!), what it can do and what it offers, and will most likely be purchasing a copy of it in the future.

So, is anyone willing to share their notable experiences with Construct 2 or advice for newbies?

Yeah C2 is awesome, I only discovered it 2 months ago and being able to make a complete game in a week with a full time job is just awesome

Welcome to the community Mr.Potato! Glad you love C2 as much as we do

Can you please help me with the leaderboard? How did you link the leaderboard with the game? And how did you exactly make the leaderboard?

So after two weeks of futzing about with the unknown that slowly became known (truth be told, this should have probably taken less time, but hey, I never said real life stopped happening), I managed to pop out something that could be called a game. It's playable at the following website:

http://takehane.ml/

really cool game, congrats

Can you please help me with the leaderboard? How did you link the leaderboard with the game? And how did you exactly make the leaderboard?

I probably wouldn't have the time to actually help you with it. The leaderboard was linked to the game via the AJAX object and PHP.

As for making the leaderboard, there's a great series of tutorials here:

scirra.com/tutorials/346/online-high-score-table-ajax-php-mysql

It'll walk you through basically everything you need to know about making it yourself. (And even include usable source files too!)

100 event limit? What?

Does that include subevents? That's not good, I didn't know about that. I better google...

Nope, this is not true

Thank goodness. I got worried. That would be ridiculous. I'm probably at or near 100 events now.

C2 ide does start to slow down and get a bit buggy as the size of the project grows, but considering everything it's doing I can't fault it.

OP I too have messed with tons of game development apps and libraries. C2 is great. I'm not sure what you meant by "limiting", because there are literally no limits to what C2 can do, well, within the confines of html5.

Great software at a pretty good price.

100 event limit? What?

Does that include subevents? That's not good, I didn't know about that. I better google...

Nope, this is not true

Thank goodness. I got worried. That would be ridiculous. I'm probably at or near 100 events now.

C2 ide does start to slow down and get a bit buggy as the size of the project grows, but considering everything it's doing I can't fault it.

OP I too have messed with tons of game development apps and libraries. C2 is great. I'm not sure what you meant by "limiting", because there are literally no limits to what C2 can do, well, within the confines of html5.

Great software at a pretty good price.

Pretty sure he was talking about the 100 event limits of the free version

Thanks for the feedback! When you say "Even if it does lack a bunch of features that the others take for granted", I'm curious which features are you talking about exactly?

Thanks for the feedback! When you say "Even if it does lack a bunch of features that the others take for granted", I'm curious which features are you talking about exactly?

Personally I would say Official analytic support other than Intel AGI. There are 3rd party analytic around, but it would feel much better if I have more option, like having Flurry officially supported by default.

I'd say analytic is the one being taken for granted.

> Thanks for the feedback! When you say "Even if it does lack a bunch of features that the others take for granted", I'm curious which features are you talking about exactly?

>

Personally I would say Official analytic support other than Intel AGI. There are 3rd party analytic around, but it would feel much better if I have more option, like having Flurry officially supported by default.

I'd say analytic is the one being taken for granted.

Is there any reason why google analytics can't be wrapped in a plugin? If not, it's easy to do and I'd be glad to do it for you real quick. Unless you're talking about a different provider?

I'd have to look into it, but if C2 runs in an iframe(?) multiple instances of Ganaltyics shouldn't be an issue.

Edit:

I should probably point out, the lowest resistance solution is to just crack open any exported "index.html" and shove your third party analytics code in there before deploying or compiling. That is, at least from my perspective.

skelooth what I'm trying to say is, I feel that analytic category is kind of missing from C2, just like monetisation was from a long time ago, we're seeing monetisation getting some love now, so why not to see some bit of love for analytic too...

I'm saying this because, when I start to get involve into gamedev october last year, I don't even know such thing as analytic, it was unintuitive and took me quite sometime to figure out that this kind of service exist, if only an analytic category was present, I would have been curious about it. It is an important part of any apps, and everybody should know about it.

The suggestion was not for me, it was for beginners who just jumped in gamedev.

Think of CocoonJS case, it was hidden so that beginner won't jump into it, same with analytic, it's not there, beginners will not at all think of making use of something that useful.

Just supporting Flurry is enough for everybody I think, in the least, officially.

To play devil's advocate, app stores provide default analytics, and most webpages already have analytics. I agree though, some analytics plugins could be useful since you could set them and forget them in the GUI

Some analytics plugins could be useful since you could set them and forget them in the GUI

Exactly my point!

I think a lot of people missing this as an important part of analyzing your game and improve them based on collected data. If you dig up old threads, there are questions like "why are't people playing my game anymore?" which they can actually get answers from analytic, but they don't even know this service exist to help them know. This is something what I call "subtle education through curiosity" since Scirra tagline is "everybody can make amazing game", and to create amazing game C2 need a subtle way to tell those people "hey use analytic!".

There are hundreds of services out there and we can't integrate them all - part of the reason we have the Javascript SDK is so you (or preferably Flurry themselves) can make plugins without having to wait for us to do it. It'd be nice if you could ask Flurry or any other web service you want to see integrated to produce their own plugins.