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Thursday, March 31, 2011

Game spotlight #002: Mini Ghost Hunter

There aren't that many games done in Construct sporting RPG elements. In fact I would have to do some research to name any right now. Good thing 7Soul made 'Mini Ghost Hunter' for the  Ludum Dare 19 competition. In only 48 hours he managed to include a skill and battle system, as well as leveling mechanics.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Clash of the browsers

In the light of the recent Firefox 4 release, I decided to get all my browsers updated to the most recent version and give it a whirl with some Construct created HTML5 goodness. I used the sun example again, which serves as a relatively hefty benchmark I guess. There are objects being constantly created, destroyed, resized and the additive effect is being used after all.

Let's take a look at the FPS ranking of the different browsers:
  1. Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421        54 FPS
  2. Google Chrome 10.0.648.204             38 FPS
  3. Firefox 4.0                                        24 FPS
  4. Opera 11.01                                      22 FPS
  5. Firefox 3.6.16                                   14 FPS
  6. Safari 5.04                                        Freeze!

To my surprise IE 9 pretty much wiped the floor with the competition I have to say! It even has a big margin over the often praised Chrome browser, which still easily secures a good second place. 

Friday, March 25, 2011

Forum rescue #002: Timer

Okay, time to tackle an easy but nonetheless important one!

Here's what U-Corp wrote (original thread):








So the task at hand is to have an object created and after 5 seconds destroyed. Sounds simple enough, but if you're going to do the following





you'll be out of luck.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Can you do that with HTML5?

I have already been babbling about what Construct 2 is capable of doing in its current state. Now in the light of the previous post, where I demonstrated a way to create a sun effect, I was wondering... could this be done already in C2?

Let's have a look at a list of features/objects I have been using for that sun in Construct 1:
- sprite object
- gradient object
- additive effect
- color filter
- distort map
- hash table object
- delta time 
- while loop
- rotation behavior
- global variables

Green color means it is already available in C2, red colored features are only available in C1. That doesn't look too promising to be honest. But let's give it a quick shot anyway!

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Forum rescue #001: Sun

Welcome to the first 'Forum rescue' post! Here we will pick up a problem/request posed on the official Construct forum and try to provide a solution. With detailed explanations and the cap file to go along with it.

Here's what Dewaldt wrote (original thread):









So let's try our luck with a glowy sun that emits a bunch of light rays. For that we just need two sprites: a white circle with a soft edge and a line that's faded from white to transparency (left to right). Simple stuff anyone can make in his favorite graphics application. Let's import these into Construct and go from there.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Impressive first gameplay video of Yokai

Seems like there's another high quality Construct game shaping up. The first gameplay video of the gorgeous indie platformer 'Yokai' by 2 Bad Company displays a very beautiful art style and a level of polish that matches commercial quality for sure. Take a look:

If I felt like criticizing anything about that video, I'd prolly mention that the smoothness of the animations doesn't seem to be quite there yet.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Game spotlight #001: Tedium - The Generic Space Survival Game


You simply have to adore a beautiful little game like 'Tedium - The Generic Space Survival Game' made by Squeemish. It's a simple affair of having to survive as long as you can while an increasing number of enemies is seeking to destroy your spacecraft.

Construct 2 you say?!?

We do have Construct 2 public previews for a while now. Despite of it being still very basic in terms of features, the most impressive thing about it might be that if you used the previous Construct version before, you intuitively already know how to handle version 2. And at the same time it feels very slick and more user-friendly already.

But what is it that you can actually already create in Construct 2? Some pretty impressive examples can be found inside this thread. There are already little versions of Asteroids, Super Mario and Pong. Granted, these demos mostly only scratch the surface of the games they try to emulate, but considering the early state of C2 I'm pleased with the outcome so far.

Here's hoping that all major browsers will adapt hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvases yesterday (I'm looking at you, Firefox!). And that we will get to see some important features soon in C2, namely an integrated image editor and animations. A recent most wanted features poll indicates that this might happen soon. Other than that I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the soon addition of an OpenGL exe-exporter.

We are Construct!

Hello world!

You have just stumbled upon a new blog with the main focus on game development with the fabulous 2D game creation software 'Construct' by Scirra. We seek to cover news, updates, games, tutorials and generally everything that's going on in the Construct community.

In case you've never heard of Construct, but are interested in 2D game development, I'd suggest you click here, learn more about the software and download it asap. It's free and easy to use!

Maybe you're already a Construct user and frequent the official forums regularly. You have come to the right place! This blog is being maintained by fellow Constructors just like yourself. We hope to become a valuable resource for all things Construct and will provide things like plugin overviews and exclusive tutorials in the future. So it should pay off to check back often.

That's it for this brief introduction, take care!