StreamTD Unfinished, feel free to use

This is the testbed project I worked on for the past few weeks to test if I wanted to fully commit to working with construct 2 as a platform. I'm sadly moving back toward just coding everything myself although I may use construct for prototyping, I decided to not take my current project any further.

With that said, I figure I'd share what I put together so far in case it provides some useful reference for anyone else out there. There is no working game per se, but the level editor and game mechanics are all there and functioning.

The game itself was intended to be a hybrid puzzle/tower defense concept that gave you the power to direct the flow of minions while having to solve color based puzzles. The first map that loads gives a pretty good indication of what the various components do.

Game Example

.capx project file

Level Editor:

To place new items on the grid, hold down a button and left click:

A - places a flow redirector (redirects the stream, right click to rotate)

Q - places a stream generator (produces a colored stream, click on it and push 1-3 to adjust the color)

Z - Barrier (blocks streams)

V - Laser (kills minions, right click to rotate)

X - Painter (recolors minions)

C - Lens (recolors stream)

E - Prism (splits streams)

W - Exit (unlocks when the correct stream color hits it, select and push 1-6 to change the color)

Guess that's about as far as I'll go with explanation. I'll check back in to answer specific questions, but in case this is my last post, thank you for jump starting my long dormant passion for building games.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that you'll need two plugins:

REX_FUNCTION

Chrome Debug Console

this is just amazing,if you work with the graphics and design the game for both mobile and web , you will make some money from this game.

i dont fully understand the concept but seems very well made, i think maybe you needed to spend more time on the presentation of the concept,your cap is also extremely well structured, complicated :), but well structured, even some function usage i really need to look into, anyway thanks for showing and sharing your work

Thanks for the feedback. It was when I needed to go from randomly building ideas to actually crafting a game experience that I felt the biggest drawbacks of construct on HTML5. The more specific I wanted to be with design elements, the more the engine fought with me. When it became apparent that I'd have to wrestle with JavaScript underneath the covers to optimize performance (especially for mobile), it just seemed easier to find an engine that would let me roll my own code from the beginning. This is just a hobby for me, so I'm perfectly content riding down the technology stack until I find a place that feels right. I don't think I want to go back to writing C++ on directx, but I'm sure there is a happy middle ground between completely declarative platforms like construct and completely native application code like C++.

Speaking of which, does anyone know of any good platforms to try out? I still want to make small 2d games (potentially on mobile), I just need a bit more flexibility in the design process and a more reliable game experience than HTML5 delivers at the moment.

This is a basically complete game, sad to see you let this one go. For one, I'd like to see it in complete form.

mrabear amazing game, I think I'll steal it ;-)

If you want a good cross platform engine I suggest Corona. Stay away from all other html5 framework because construct2 is the best performance wise.

I'm definitely not abandoning the idea, if anything, I wanted to take the idea further and just didn't want to start down that road unless I was comfortable on the platform. I have to say though, between your comments and reading Finish your Games, I'm getting tempted to just downsize my expectations and put a wrapper on it in construct, even if it isn't the end product I wanted and even if I don't think it is much of a challenge in it's current form.

Food for thought, I guess. Corona was on the short list already, so I will certainly check it out.

What was it that you were having trouble making? What was it about C2 that you were having difficulty with?

As soon as I started experimenting with sound, things started to perform poorly and stutter quite a bit. I've seen this from many HTML5 games so I am not entirely sure if construct can do anything about that. Add that to the fact that I actually want to manipulate the sound (open it up, inspect the waveform etc) before syncing it up with the game play. I got the feeling that I'd spend a chunk of time wrestling with attaching custom code only to have it perform inconsistently in each platform/browser because of spotty HTML5 implementations.

Again, this isn't really a problem with construct, so I'm not sure if my experience can really be constructive for you. I can say that short of needing to use rex_function, construct surprised me for how far I was actually able to take it out of the box. Coming from a development background, I had not taken the idea of a programming free development environment too seriously (I put it in the 'toy' category). You can't be all things to all people though, and I can say that you won me over for being a fantastic prototyping environment. I was able to find a way to accomplish just about any piece of logic I wanted, and it was always easy to try ideas out without making major investments up front.

The sound issues I was having was certainly the fault of HTML5. I'm sure there are ways to work around this and improve things, but that isn't where I want to spend my time. I'm just a hobbyist, so it's easier to move to a more established platform and let the HTML5 issues get sorted out by more invested parties.