Scirra.com redesign

For a few days now you can enjoy the completely redesigned Scirra website, which keeps the green color scheme, but has a much cleaner and more professional look to it. Definitely an overdue step in the right direction regarding Scirra's future business plans with Construct 2.

Most importantly the new site now properly integrates the forum, forming a single community-friendly entity. There are more interactive features like a blog you can comment on and a special section to post indepth tutorials. All that's complemented by a reputation points system, which is supposed to reward you for contributing. A nice little touch, which will hopefully encourage good content rather than wake some of the spam devils.

As expected there are a few minor quirks to be worked out, some of which already have been addressed, like the too big font in forum posts. Also it seems to take some time to spread the word about gravatar.com, which is now the service used for displaying the avatar image (many reputable sites use it, this is not evil ;).

Overall I'm quite happy with the new face of Scirra and the efforts that are made to make the site a better community. They promise there's more to come and with Construct 2 dropping new builds left and right at the moment, it surely seems this will gonna be a good summer for all users!

Forum rescue #004: Bitmap font damage

This will be a pretty lengthy one, so prepare yourself.

Okay, from just reading what Shiru wrote (original thread)you can't really figure out the problem. He linked to a gameplay video of Casltevania, where enemies are being hit, displaying the damage they took above their heads.

How would one do that in Construct, using a custom bitmap font of course and not just plain text? The answer is relatively simple, although there are a few things to consider. But let's start at the beginning, shall we.

Forum rescue #003: Respawn an enemy

New scirra forum member darklad posted the following help request (original thread):

Let's open a new game project in Construct and add two sprites. One for the enemy and one for the nest, which is supposed to spawn the enemy. Additional to that we will make use of the Function object and also be needing the MouseKeyboard object for this tryout.

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.