Scirra.com has announced in an Open letter to the Construct community forums they will be releasing the eagerly awaited pre-alpha version of Construct 2.0 for public preview this weekend. Not much has been said about it yet but it promises to be a marked improvement over the original construct program and to quote “a totally modular export system, which means we can adapt it to new technologies for years to come “.
Construct 2 will not be backwards compatible with CAP files created in 0.xx release versions but was something that was expected with a new software architecture in C2.
Exciting times ahead now that they are going to focus on the C2 while granting access to continue 0.x releases to any interested developers.
It’s looking like it will continue to be free at this stage. There will be plenty of buzz over the weekend.
Construct is a voluntary based project with people contributing in their spare time.
Released Friday, Unstable builds means it’s untested. Only install for reporting bugs. Use the latest stable build to avoid problems with unknown bugs… stable release found here
Changelog
Editor
- [CHANGE] Cleartype enabled for as many places as I can find in the editor. Also changed the font in many places from Arial to Segoe UI. (Ashley)
Animation Bar
- [FIX] Launch Explorer no longer crashes when you have an action point
Runtime
- [FIX] Fixed slowdown when using per pixel collisions. (R0J0hound)
- [FIX] Fixed crashes when using families with private variables. (R0J0hound)
3d Object
- [ADD] Can now change the z position at runtime (Davo)
Event Wizard
- [FIX] Crash that occured if you obtained an expression from an object before typing anything into the expression editor. (Davo)
Testing the particles emitters in Construct to generate some standared looking explosions for the game. There are 3 particles emitters for each explosion, smoke, fire, and a sparks. Because there will be different sized enemy spites and types then the size of explosion will vary from small, medium, and large. There’s also a player bullet collision particle emitter to mimic bullet ricochet. I don’t yet have any decent game sprite graphics yet, I will be working on these later on once I get the gameplay and waves of enemies to fly in pattern formations. I think I will have to work on a custom sprite formation editor app to create these as I’m guessing it’s not going to easy to define these game sprites XY coordinates manually.
In the example below I’ve slowed the video down so it’s easier to see explosions of different sized sprite enemies. I haven’t got any games sprites so I’m using temporary graphics instead.
Next I added missile collisions. I’ve added an ‘exit’ particle emitter effect to give the impression of missile impact. I’ve again slowed the video down by half to easily see the subtle difference between a gun impact explosions and missile impact explosions.
Next I’ll look into working on background graphics and scrolling.
The game
Going to create my first game as a horizontal scroller shot’em up.
I’m not doing anything in any particular order since I’m just starting out this project I’m going to play with various aspects the game and assemble it a bit at a time.
The game story will probably develop sooner rather than later and it’s something I’m thinking about as I progress. The story will give me ideas for game dynamics, how it will play, and the length of the game. I want the game levels to start on Earth, eventually move into space and then onto an alien world. This requires the player to change from Air to Air combat to deep space combat. Though I do have a rough storyline I don’t won’t to give too much away at this stage.
Getting started
The first step i’m going to look into is player control. It’s going to be primarily mouse controlled input with left and right buttons for primary and secondary weapons. I want to use graphics representative of what I want. Air to air will start with a helicopter.
The helicopter, otherwise know as Littlebird. Will eventually pack quite a punch when I’m done with it.
This may or may not be the final graphic for the first level but its a start. An example of player control and primary weapons can be seen in the video below. Sprite continuously follows mouse with a delay or a set speed. This to me feels more comfortable than keyboard control and I think it more likely casual gamers will be used to mouse control.
No animation for the rotatory blades yet and temp graphics for missiles and bullets. The number counting down from 400 to 0 represents gun heat, this will be a hidden feature in the final game. If you fire continuously and for too long the number eventually decreases to Zero, then the bullets become infrequent, random, and less predictable pattern. On releasing the mouse button the number increments back up to 400 and the bullets fire normally again. The reason why I’ve used a floating number and not rounded it is due to the way construct processes the event system and when it draws the graphics on screen. Different computers and GPU’s will process data at different speeds so theres a concept called Timedelta that simply processes something no matter the difference in speed one computer has over another. Timedelta is a very small floating value. I found if I round the number to a whole number then the primary gun speed varies on different computers. When the number reaches 150 note the smoke on littlebird guns. This will probably be the only indication that the player knows they should be aware to preserve the primary weapon by releasing the left mouse button for only a few seconds.
Power ups
Cant have a shot’em up with out power ups! I’ve yet to decide what type of power ups I’m going to add, but I know how they the system will work but still need to design it. I will revisit it after I’ve do more experimentation with the rest if the game.
So I’m going to try and make a game, or least a demo. I’ve had a few ideas and decided to muddle together a side-scroller shoot ‘em up or shumup. I found what looks like an easy to use free open-source game creator at scirra.com called Construct.
Looking at some the demos it looks fairly easy to use and requires no programming experience. It’s driven by events and conditions triggered from top to bottom. Sprites, I/O, and sounds are driven by these events and conditions and logic trigger events and sub-events.
I’ve had a quick play with the interface and it seems stable. The Application also has an API and allows others to add their own specialised plug-ins for the community to use and looking at what other have created it all looks like a supportive community.
