AirConsole Game Dev Contest 2017

No problem, glad you got it right

So we just submitted our game for the 2016 student competition (due today). It was a learning experience for all of us, but one of the biggest challenges we faced was how to use smartphones to control a fast-paced action game.

This is a summary of the iterations we had to go through:

1. D-pad with proportional control, sending D-pad position to the screen every 0.1 seconds. This turned out to be completely unplayable due to lag and the fact that your thumb was never where you thought it was.

2. D-pad with binary control (up-down-left-right-diagonal), sending data every 0.1 seconds. This was playable, but suffered from a ton of lag.

3. D-pad with binary control, sending data only when the buttons changed. This was WAY more playable, but the buttons were too small, and it was hard to tell where your thumb was.

4. Left Thumb: up/down. Right Thumb: left/right. This worked really well, but we lost the ability to control primary/secondary weapons. We then had to redesign the game mechanics so that the primary weapon was always on. We still had no way to do a secondary weapon, and we needed a way for people to self-destruct if they had lost all mobility.

5. Left thumb: forward/self-destruct. Right thumb: left/right. In order to get this to work, we had to totally change the mechanics to eliminate the ability to drive backward, and add an "automatic flipping" feature to the physics engine so that players could always get out of a bad situation.

The bottom line is that you can't treat an AirConsole game like a regular console game, where designing the controller is secondary. You have to design for a flat touchscreen first, then adjust your game mechanics as necessary so that everything works.

cjbruce Thank you for the insight i'm working on on submitting for the 2017 version and this will greatly help me

ishmaelmoreno You are welcome! I'm glad it helps. We're big fans of the AirConsole platform at our school, and the better the games are, the better the experience for everyone.

Psychokiller1888

We are trying to stay up-to-date on the AirConsole Construct 2 plugin, and are working as a team across multiple computers. We have all downloaded the AirConsole plugin from github at various times. On one of the computers we are getting the following error, and are unable to use the project file. Is this something that is an easy fix?

Hi!

You are usng a depracted plugin or something like that, because action 8 is "Show add" and that is available on the plugin. I never remove actions/conditions/expressions so that never happens. Did you maybe download from my git repo? If so, just update your plugin and it should be fine. The versionning on mine is relative, as I cannot jump too many version numbers on the official plugin

Hi everyone,

I've tried the AirConsole plugin (downloaded yesterday from github), but it doesn't work with more than 1 player.

I did the following :

• exported the Pong example (HTML5, embed style), renamed "index.html" to "screen.html", added the provided "controller.html" file
• ran my game from AirConsole (address looks like : http://www.airconsole.com/?http=1#http: ... e-game-is/) on Firefox
• added 2 controllers one after the other (a phone and a tablet)

The game and the 2 controllers display correctly and start running. Two player icons (one for each controller) appear on the AirConsole bar, on top of the game. The following messages appear on Firefox console (among some WebGL errors) : "WebRTC active for device_id 1" then "WebRTC active for device_id 2".

However, only one player (the first who joined the game) can actually play and only the red paddle on the left appears. It seems like the "On device join" event only triggers once, no matter in which order the controllers join the game.

I didn't modify any of the provided files, and I'm running Construct 2 r239.

So how could I get this to work?

I never tried the pong exemple, but it's pretty deprecated as the plugin got updated a lot lately. Make sure the plugin settings are correctly set for the max players. All I can say is that on join does trigger correctly

Psychokiller1888 sent you something via pm a while ago. Did you get it?

No more excuses for not having a cool controller now! The plugin just got my pull request merged, and I have added support for extended messages, making the official controller generator compatible. The generated controller is ready to use with your C2 game. Just update your plugin to at least version 1.4.6.1

Psychokiller1888 thank you for the update!! and all the best for the new year

Thank you, to you too happy new year!

Hi everyone,

I've tried the AirConsole plugin (downloaded yesterday from github), but it doesn't work with more than 1 player.

I did the following :

- exported the Pong example (HTML5, embed style), renamed "index.html" to "screen.html", added the provided "controller.html" file

- ran my game from AirConsole (address looks like : http://www.airconsole.com/?http=1#http: ... e-game-is/) on Firefox

- added 2 controllers one after the other (a phone and a tablet)

The game and the 2 controllers display correctly and start running. Two player icons (one for each controller) appear on the AirConsole bar, on top of the game. The following messages appear on Firefox console (among some WebGL errors) : "WebRTC active for device_id 1" then "WebRTC active for device_id 2".

However, only one player (the first who joined the game) can actually play and only the red paddle on the left appears. It seems like the "On device join" event only triggers once, no matter in which order the controllers join the game.

I didn't modify any of the provided files, and I'm running Construct 2 r239.

So how could I get this to work?

Zoglu, I don't know if you found a fix for this yet, but have you tried setting the AirConsole maximum number of players to something greater than 1 in the editor?

I just realized this myself after 2 months of extremely convoluted development because only 2 devices were triggering the "On Device Joined" condition.

In the end, I set the max players to 99 so that I could detect when an unlimited number of players have joined, then sent a "Too many players" message to any device that joins after my in-game player limit of 8 players has been reached.

You have a ''on too many players'' trigger for that...

You have a ''on too many players'' trigger for that...

I was struggling with this one. Does "on too many players" give you the deviceid of the device which is trying to join? Maybe using AirConsole.deviceID?