Game Design and Art tutorials - Kickstarter funded!

Thank you stemkoski ! I'll be sure to keep the flow going !

So, my latest two articles are a bit different from the very specific Construct 2 tutorials that came before them. Today, I released a summary of the "Marketing indie games on a 0$ budget" talk from Emmy Jonassen.

I also had the chance to do a detailed interview of the senior visual storyteller Adam Duff. The second part of it will be out on 08/07 (on Thursday), and will contain many pieces of advice for aspiring artists.

I don't know if I can add this kind of content to the tutorial section, but I thought it would be of interest for a lot of people around here. It also gave me some room to do a bit of research about AI, which will finally come next Tuesday!

Hello everyone! I just released the second part of the Interview with the senior concept artist Adam Duff! This one contains insights and advice for aspiring professional artists!

I'm working on a primer article about AI for Tuesday. Anything specific you'd like me to cover over the following weeks? It will mostly be intermediate level material, as construct offers a lot of easy to use tools to base solid AI on (pathfinding, Line of Sight...).

It might help user to make a callback more easeier. It also could be used to get function call from network through Ajax or web socket.

rexrainbow : thanks, I checked this out. I try to focus tutorials on the core functionality of Construct at the moment. But as time passes by, I'll most likely be covering a few plugins (and many of yours are really useful). I already plan on showcasing the FSM plugin for the FSM tutorial, as managing enter and exit states in an elegant way isn't trivial with plain events.

Very good. Thank you.

Very nice, I look forward to seeing more.

Thanks — !

I have a client at the moment, this was sort of unexpected. Thus, I have to delay today's tutorial exceptionally. It's partly written already, but I have (fortunately!) more work than I can handle at the moment!

Sorry for that, it'll be out on next Tuesday.

but I have (fortunately!) more work than I can handle at the moment!

Congrats! Freelancers dream/Um, nightmare - lol. Great stuff. Catch your tut on Tuesday

DUTOIT : ! Now I've got to find a way to offer valuable content in less time! Thankfully with AI, I can cover examples in capx and video rather than long, sometimes boring text.

Finally, here's my first tutorial on AI programming... with Finite State Machines (FSMs) ! Those are one of the easiest ways to manage not only your AI, but also many parts of your games. rexrainbow made a few very useful plugins especially for that: a global FSM and a behavior-based FSM. There is even a specific plugin for menus!

Anyway, I'll add the tutorial to the repository of Scirra tutorials ASAP. Until then, please tell me if there are specific AI examples you'd like me to cover? I believe that AI is better learned by seeing and tweaking code directly.

Cheers everyone,

Nathan

Hi everyobody,

I just added the FSM tutorial to scirra's tutorial repository.

Please tell me if you'd like me to create specific examples. FSMs are really a generic tool that are super useful (if not required) to make tons of AI types and objects. Anyway, I believe they're easier to learn by example, rather than using plain text.

New tutorial released - How to AI by example : Platform follower. It shows a way to program an AI that detects obstacles using a captor object.

Hi everyone,

I just released a new tutorial called Drastically reduce your game's download size with image compression (edited according to Kyatric's pointer).

I hope you'll like it!

Image compression in Construct 2.

Kyatric : ah true, I forgot about that one (never used it really, I thought you had to set it up per-image). It does use png quantization as well (well, pretty much every tool uses that compression for png). I'll edit the tutorial today then.

EDIT : I modified the tutorial, added a section at the top that shows how to open and use the image compression dialog in C2. I hope this can still help a few users. Thanks again Kyatric for the pointer. I have gone through a fair amount of pages in the manual, but C2 is a complex piece of software, thus you always stumble upon features on the fly.

Hey everyone,

I am back with a new tutorial: 4 productivity tricks with the event editor! In this one, I tried to share some basic techniques that fluidify your C2 programming experience in the long run. Some processes are picked from the manual, like the keyboard shortcuts. Other are just general tips to optimize your coding workflow.

As always, I'm really eager to hear your feedback and requests for new articles!

Next week, I want to release my first free art assets pack: an organized UI set for your mobile games. For the upcoming weeks, I am working on 2 tutorial requests:

1- How to make an Arcade platformer with basic AI (patrol, shoot)

2- How to easily use JSON data in your C2 project (for translations in particular).

Kind regards,

Nathan