[Dev Blog] Prototype for platform shooter

Just picked up Construct last week and have been loving it so far. I come from the creative side of things (graphic designer by trade) so I'm loving the way it all works.

Here's a crummy gif of what I've got so far. Really basic but just trying to get the mechanisms I'd like to use. No bullet events set up yet; that's on dock for this week.

Also working my way through JayJay's book (I'm using CC) and it is incredibly helpful. Dude also peeped my .cap file and fixed a collision error I was having and added some solid notation. Stoked that the community can be that supportive.

My daughter and I are just learning C2 - your start looks really great and she would be pretty jealous. Keep up the good work!

Kay.

It looks awesome :0

RayKi and blurtsmum Thanks!

With the help of stemkoski 's tutorial on AI and state machines, I was able to set up some simple states for my test enemies this weekend. Nothing worth showing, but they worked and my event sheet was organized which is mostly what I was after. Also learned about including event sheets within event sheets which is really handy. I'm a huge fan of organization and immediately saw the benefits of this.

Finishing up the Construct book this weekend and hoping to really start putting time towards the prototype next week.

The zero to game time in Construct 2 is so great.

I like the style of the game so far, although the field of view seems a bit small.

icugigasoft Thanks for the constructive criticism! It is a bit cramped. I'll be sure to expand the FOV as I move forward.

looks addicting bclikesyou

Thanks mannygill99!

[Update]

Finished up most of Jayjay 's book and definitely feel like I have a solid enough grasp to move forward with a prototype.

However!

I spent a while in the forums last night reading up on CC and, from what I've read, it just makes sense to hop up to C2 and avoid any potential issues that could arise down the road. I'm not looking to make a "big" game just yet, but I'd rather just make the jump to C2 now rather than in the middle of a project. Plus most of my friends (who I'd like to try my prototype) are mac users, so this way they'll actually get to try it out.

Most of what I learned so far seems like it can be applied to C2. So I'm going to take this weekend and "catch up" to where I was at with CC. Basically just remake the small layout I did / do Ashley's platformer tut and remake the state machine demo. Part of me is bummed that I spent 2 weeks with CC and don't have a ton to show but another part of me knows that it's the smarter thing to do moving forward.

Thanks again for reading my book Moving on makes sense for multiplatform, and the knowledge really does carry on pretty easily into C2.

There are some things that CC can still do better right now, but sharing the game on anything other than Windows is definitely not one of those Also, C2 editor has some very appreciated improvements and is less buggy overall.

With export, right now Node Webkit 10.5 is the best choice for executable, but web is really what C2 is meant for while the third party wrappers (and Google Chrome) catch up to the promise of HTML5 + WebGL. If you use only Canvas2D (no WebGL FX) then WiiU might be a possible export platform too! (hopefully someday WiiU will support WebGL).

In the case of Insanity's Blade, I notice that the game demands a really high-spec (and recent) machine to run properly, where GPU limitations will decrease framerate, and CPU limitations can wreak havoc on collision, event ordering, and also framerate too (try to always stay at or above 60fps, or things get strange). We're still debugging oddities here and there, but overall the game is received well which we're glad for

Hope that helps and good luck! I really love the graphics style you're going with so far

Jayjay So far the jump to C2 has been mostly painless. A few things are changed around and I just need to adjust to where they are. Most of the keyboard shortcuts are the same and I think those help my workflow the most. Like you said, most of what I learned from CC and your book is carrying over easily. Plus some of the events in your book help with creative and constructive thinking on how to fix problems.

FYI I started Insanity's Blade last night and really dig it! Totally reminds me of those old Sega platformer / hack 'n slashers like Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Splatterhouse, etc. I didn't really catch any bugs or glitches, especially since I was looking for them. I think the only oddity is when I was in a level and selected "exit to map": the ground would disappear for a split second and there'd be an audio spike. But this happened so quickly and it moved to the map that it really wasn't an issue. But overall the game was running smoothly. Here are my machine specs incase that helps you any.

Windows 7

AMD Athlon II Triple-Core 3.3ghz

XFX AMD Radeon HD 7750 1GB

8gb RAM

Playing through my HD TV 1366 x 768 (I was playing the game in 16:9).

Glad to hear the book helped as well as that you're enjoying the game ! and hehe yeah on a really good PC like that Insanity's Blade runs pretty well. The audio and delay in jumping to map is definitely one of the oddities of the runtime/engine, as we have done most work around efforts we could to minimize it.

Every game has bugs or glitches at some point though, so the main thing we aim for is that there is nothing game-breaking, which stops the player from finishing the game. Construct 2 was pretty awesome in that both I and damainman were able to make such a large game between just the two of us in just over a year, so I hope you find it works out great for your games too!

All up to speed with C2!

I really need to learn how to make better gifs...Here is a video link which is much better.

At any rate, feel good about where I'm at. Still a handful of things I'd like to add before I have a solid prototype. Those would be:

• Graphic life gauge
• A "pop-up" shooter enemy
• One more type of enemy
• Text dialogues

I'm at ~30 events. I think I could keep it under 100 and get a small game out of it. If anyone would like to look at my capx, here is the link. Feel free to give me some constructive criticism. Especially with thinning out my events and getting the same results.

New enemy! Turns and faces your direction once you're in LoS. Shoots a bullet at your angle. Video here!

Working on one more enemy. Then text dialogs. Then I'll move on to working on the actual demo.

Not doing any actual development tonight. Instead typing up a game design doc for the demo. Definitely going to help keep me on track!

After spending a long weekend crawling through caves in Kentucky, I'm back with some work to show.

First off, I recruited a friend to help me with art for the demo. He's definitely a better artist than I am, which is great. Asked him to mock up some tiles and background sprites (tiled of course) and he sent me this:

At the same time, I got a decent walk cycle going for the main character. Peep that here.

Pretty soon we'll have a bit more art, along with a title screen/main graphic and I'll start a proper thread just for the demo.