Game played over weeks - am I being too ambitious?

Hi dudes, I've been playing with Construct 2 for about a week and love it so far, I love the simplicity over other methods of making games. I used to make games in Flash which was fine, and then I tried ImpactJS which is powerful, but can take a long time to get something working that you can do in 5 mins in Construct 2.

My eventual project idea is to create a game that requires login to a database which allows to track user progress, so they can get level up, get upgrades, new weapons, equipment etc, and continue to play the game for weeks or months.

I know Construct is more about short quick shooter/platform games, and not intended for games that you play over a long time like I'm planning - but is this something that's going to be easy in Construct, or am I being far too ambitious?

Everything is possible in C2 , just keep it 2D

Taking note of your rep , seems like you just started

You are too ambitious ...

And who said that it was only about quickshooters/platformers ?

we got an RPG in progress made with C2

Search courier

Check the how do I FAQ and the manual at the section AJAX you should find everything you need concerning sending and retrieving data from a database.

Be aware that the server side will have to be coded in an another language (C2 doesn't handle it, it just allows you to make the client).

Also C2 is not restricted to short quick shooter/platform games, it just happens that those are the games most people do.

onion

C2 isn't all about short quick shooter/platform games. I'm in the progress of making an RPG and I know there are quite a few others ' loot pursuit' for example. These take longer that's all.

seems interesting what you are wanting to achieve. Hope you keep us up to date with your progress.

Kyatric

thanks for the info on the AJAX section, i'm still finding my way around.

Not to throw more gasoline on the fire, but like the others have said you can make longer games with C2.

And we are also working on a rewrite of our web based MMO using C2 as the front end. All of the actual work is done on the back end via php/MySQL. We're using Ajax to bring data to the user and to allow C2 to be the interface to make things happen.

Thanks to Whiteclaws for the mention! It is definitely capable of longer, deeper experiences. It's actually quite well-suited to it, I've found. But you need to do some planning, prototyping, and organization at the start to increase your odds of success.

In all seriousness, build a smaller game using some of the mechanics you'd like to include in your bigger project. This lets you prototype, get a finished game (no small task!), and experience with the engine. You'll run into some of the same natural roadblocks that you would on your long-form game, but they're easier to fix when they don't have the potential to cripple weeks/months of work or set you back too far. I made a maze game that you control as you would a top-down, 8-direction rpg. I got to play with dynamically zooming, z-ordering, different movement speeds, touch input, interacting with environmental triggers, fake unified shadowing, etc, in a much easier-to-produce game. I even got got to play with leaderboards, posting to social networks, and a lot of great workflow things without the overhead of inventory management, quest statuses, npc's, a fleshed-out story, or a ton of animation.

Use your small game that gets you used to C2 as your quasi-prototype for your larger game and kill a flock of birds with one stick of dynamite.

Also, check out Courier in my signature to see some of the stuff I'm doing. It will be playable (though I'll be updating continuously adding content) in May. I hope it helps you some. Also check out Loot Oursuit. Arima has since moved it to C2 (from Construct Classic), but it shows some more things that can be done and may be more like what you're looking to do.

C-7

really good helpful advice.

I'm myself building my own little RPG with procedurally generated dungeon , and believe me , you should really take that advice of C-7 seriously ...

C-7 - To build smaller games as prototypes of individual mechanics to be used in a larger project... That's stinkin' brilliant.   

theubie - That sounds crazy cool. Has it been difficult to get C-2 to talk to mySQL? Do you know if it possible to store simple data (variables, etc) in the database without using AJAX?

You're going to have to use Ajax to store things in the database...not really a way around it other than opening a websock connection.

Basically, C2 is being used as a very pretty (and powerful) GUI for our game. It's a LOT easier than our original iterations of the game. Our original game had a pure php/html front end. You moved from page to page and that worked ok. Our next iteration moved to a pure HTML/Javascript/Ajax routine and that allowed us to make our interface look good, but we were still bound primarily by HTML for how things look.

Using C2 I actually can use artists to directly create sprites and background and not have to chop them up in Photoshop and lay them out using HTML elements. In the previous versions I had some great concept art work that just wouldn't translate to HTML that I had to pass on.

We're still a long way out from an open alpha/beta test, but the combination of having written the back end for this game 3 times with the flexibility and features that C2 offer has already made just our bare bones prototyping of the game as much if not more enjoyable than our other two versions combined.

That is awesome.

As awareness of C2's capacities spread, I think we are going to see it used in more and more non-game applications.

Thanks for all the replies and support guys! What I'll definitely do is create a few games first before I get onto my big complex game! By the sound of it, the way I want my game to work is similar to theubie's

Let me know if you run into any issues. I'd be happy to lend help as I can.

Thanks theubie, and sorry for the late reply but I'm going to take you up on your offer of advice! You say you're working on an MMO that uses a C2 frontend, and php/mySQL backedn, well that's what I'm working towards too. But right now I'm trying to figure out how to create RPG quests.

Like a typical sort of RPG my game allows a player to talk to NPCs and get quests, some of which have sub-tasks. How do you keep track of which quests you have, and which NPCs you've already talked to?

Thanks theubie, and sorry for the late reply but I'm going to take you up on your offer of advice! You say you're working on an MMO that uses a C2 frontend, and php/mySQL backedn, well that's what I'm working towards too. But right now I'm trying to figure out how to create RPG quests.

Like a typical sort of RPG my game allows a player to talk to NPCs and get quests, some of which have sub-tasks. How do you keep track of which quests you have, and which NPCs you've already talked to?

I use an array and then I have a google docs spreadsheet for my own reference. Everything in the 0 column pertains to the status of a certain quest. Everything in the 1 column pertains to each NPC, for instance, and whether you have talked to them or not. For my quests I set at 0,2 to 0 if the quest is open, 1 if you are currently in it, and 2 if it is completed (and so on for all of them). You can do something similar for NPCs. I also use different array cells for inventory management, though my inventory is simpler than in many RPGs. You can then output the whole array AsJSON and upload it wherever or however you want (I store it on clay.io and then retrieve it for loading).