How to collaborate on Construct projects with GitHub

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This tutorial is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Please refer to the license text if you wish to reuse, share or remix the content contained within this tutorial.

Introduction

Often people want to work on the same Construct project as a team. Construct supports saving projects in a folder structure, where each part of the project is saved to a separate file. This is specifically designed to help teams work on each part of the project separately.

However trying to manage contributions, versions and merging by hand is a tedious and error-prone process. Source control software is designed to solve this problem. Some excellent solutions exist, such as SVN and Git. While these tools are designed for traditional programming systems (we use them for developing Construct itself), they can in fact work with any files, and are especially good with text-based files. Since Construct project, event sheet and layout information is saved in text-based formats, it lends itself well to source control.

There are also online source control services, which take care of a lot of details for you, such as hosting your files. There are many such services out there, and you could probably use any of them. However this tutorial focuses on GitHub since it's one of the most popular services, provides a decent free tier, and has a well-designed web interface.

Source control tools are so useful that many individual developers still find them useful, even though they are not working in a team. The tools provide features like viewing exactly what you've changed, showing a log of changes with descriptions, allowing you to view the exact changes made at any point in the past, rolling back to previous versions, branching to make experimental changes, and more. This can be invaluable for ambitious projects developed solo, so it can worth learning the process even if you aren't in a team.

This tutorial does not require any paid features, so you can try it out with the Free edition of Construct and a free GitHub account.

Head to the next page to get started.

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  • I've been waiting for this. Thank you finally!!

  • As a solo dev hesitant to jump into source control, your tutorial was a game-changer! Now I'm excited to finally integrate it into my workflow and open the door to future collaboration. Thanks for making it so approachable!

  • Very useful and succinct tutorial on using source control via GitHub. thank you.

  • Very cool, when using this though, if I modify the position of an object or add new object etc, changes appear in my GIT commit list. However if I change a tilemap, adding or removing tiles, those changes do not appear in the commit list.

      • [-] [+]
      • 2
      • Ashley's avatar
      • Ashley
      • Construct Team Founder
      • 2 points
      • (3 children)

      All changes should appear in your commit list. If changes do not appear, then you have not saved the project, and the changes won't be there when you next open the project either.

      • I've tested a few times, certainly saving the project - if I move an object and save, it appears. If I modify a tilemap and save then nothing appears in the commit list.

        What's interesting is if I edit the tile map and then do something like move an objects position, when I commit the changes the tile map edits are saved. So that data is being captured, its just if I edit the tilemap and do nothing else, git thinks I've made no edits to the project and nothing appears in the commit list.

          • [-] [+]
          • 0
          • Ashley's avatar
          • Ashley
          • Construct Team Founder
          • 0 points
          • *
          • (0 children)

          Tilemap data is saved in the corresponding layout JSON file, so check for changes there. Maybe GitHub Desktop isn't checking there or something, or perhaps you forgot to add the files in the first place.

      • Recorded a quick video showing the issue: youtu.be/QRjykEozW-U

  • Scirra has since enforced updates upon any user.

    This breaks version control more often than not, and leads to losing time and resources.

    I tried reasoning with them on a thread to no use, even though any other user agreed a toggle in options or at the very least an advanced Chrome parameter was necessary.

    There is a workaround I discovered recently:

    1. Go to the editor version url (editor.construct.com/rXXX)

    2. Three dots Chrome menu -> More tools -> Create Shortcut (open as new window)

    3. Pin this window to your taskbar.

    This way, you can actually control when you want your team to upgrade.

    In case anyone at Scirra cares, the same issues I talked about in the thread you dismissed are still ongoing and affect Github workflows.

      • [-] [+]
      • 2
      • Ashley's avatar
      • Ashley
      • Construct Team Founder
      • 2 points
      • *
      • (3 children)

      You can choose which version of Construct you use on our releases page.

      Everyone on the team needs to be on the same version of Construct, because save files are not backwards compatible. So make sure if you upgrade, everyone does it at the same time. Even if something goes wrong, source control lets you roll back to a working version at any time.

      FWIW I'm using GitHub with my own game project and so far it's working out great.

      • For anyone reading this reply, my workaround fixes the known "Stuck in old version" bug which annoys a lot of people around the discord at the very least (PWA c3 gets stuck to the version you install it as, and inconsistently prompts you with an update on launch which leads to members sometimes doing commits in an older version) and also lets you actually stick to a version in case some custom functionality breaks without your consent.

        Additionally those using custom engine launchers or edits were in a disadvantage as it was impossible to choose when to upgrade your team to a new version. I still lost time because of the devs not implementing a basic software QOL option before finding this workaround. The original post has everything noted.

        Your work is awesome, Ashley, but you are ignoring a lot of paying customers by not even adding an advanced option like a Chrome parameter for disabling the enforced updates which have consistently broken workflows.

          • [-] [+]
          • 2
          • Ashley's avatar
          • Ashley
          • Construct Team Founder
          • 2 points
          • *
          • (1 child)

          Updates are not mandatory - you can choose whichever release you want to use on the releases page. If you work in a team, your whole team need to upgrade at the same time. That's a part of project management that your team will need to handle - software can't handle that for you.

          If you install the stable version, then the installed version will always update to the latest stable release, and if you install a beta version, then the installed version will always update to the latest beta release. That should always work consistently, and if it doesn't, please file an issue.

          • If anyone wants to work consistently and freely using Github, currently the PWA is not the way to go. Shortcutting an editor version works exactly as it was before you enforced updates, and has never given me any issues since. I just click c3 on my taskbar, and the correct version is displayed for everyone.

            If anyone wants extra steps and the risk of losing progress, that's cool. Tried reasoning on the forums a long time ago, to everyone's frustration on the dev's responses. I still respect his stance, and his work is absolutely incredible (has been my main professional engine for too long to remember).

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