Match-3 in Construct 2: part one

Gosh, quite a lot has been happening with Construct 2 since I last posted. The addition of a WebGL renderer speeds games up considerably, Scirra now features an Arcade on their site where you can submit your C2-made treasures and the custom plugin development is basically exploding. That's just to mention a few highlights.

Certainly a good time to come back and do some more blogging. And what's better than a tutorial to brush up on those rusty C2-skills of yours?

One of my more notable achievements with Construct Classic surely was the Match-3 tutorial, which quite a few people seemed to find useful. Since there's always interest in this kind of puzzle games, I decided to put a little effort into creating a similar guide for Construct 2. And here are the humble beginnings:

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.

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.