Any pointers for a Construct 2 crash course?

Hi everyone!

I'll be presenting a Construct 2 8-hours crash course in a meetup at our local IGDA chapter and I'd love to get some pointers from people who have presented similar courses in the past. I'm specially interested in suggestions about topics and course structure.

Just to make everything clear, this is not my first course, but it is my first one about Construct 2. Also, the audience cosists mainly of people who are already in the game industry, indies and game dev students, so we can assume they have some background on game making, game engines and code logic.

That's it. Anything helps!

Thank you all in advance!

Hmmm... I guess level design would be a good one.

I've played a lot of romhacks and game types in general yet level design still seems to be one of my main weaknesses.

A lot of people in the game industry worked in pairs or more (such as ID Software and Team Meat) because some people were just seemingly better at using tools than the tool creator himself.

I noticed a lot of one man teams go for Roguelikes instead.

As I mentioned, the idea is getting them to learn the basics of construct as a game building engine.

I'd say that game and Level design are topics far more interesting when you already know the tool you'll be working with. And, also, not even tool related, so, not the focus of this course.

In that case just look through the capx's in the examples folder and see which ones can be presented as they are.

I would pobably talk about the strengths of visual scripting, or the Event sheet in this case, and how it can speed up development, and allow non coders to understand and easily create things.

Some good points I like about construct.

* Good overview of what actually is going on.

* Easy to learn.

* Fast prototyping of mechanics and gameplay.

* As a designer you're not at the mercy of a team to visualize your ideas.

* Extending construct with plugins, effects and behaviours. (Construct out of the box is missing a lot of advanced features, but as a studio with some javascripters, you can create a lot of functionality that is not included in vanilla construct.)

Yeah. Right now I'm working on structure and content. I thought of something like the list below:

1. Interface: Show them the general interface of the program, specially properties, layers and projects windows.

2. Layouts & Event Sheets: Explain what layouts and event sheets are and how they relate to one another.

3. Objects: What are objects and how to add and use them.

4. Events & Actions: Show the trigger structure of construct with the events and the actions they trigger. Explain the top-down execution.

5. Global & Instance Variables: What are variables, how to use them, the types of variables and differences between local and global.

6. Behaviors: Adding behaviors to objects and setting them up.

7. Templates & Examples: What are them and how to use them.

8. Best practices: A miscelaneous selection of things that will make their construct projects more efficient.

9. Community: Show them this forum, how to get help from people around and where to find new plugins and behaviors.

I guess this will be the content for the course. My idea is to teach each of these aspects while making a game. I'd rather not use the top-down shooter, since they can find that everywhere. Maybe remaking a well-known simple game would be a better option.

What do you think?

List/structure looks good. Also some great points by tunepunk . I second that it's probably worth mentioning the fast prototyping and ease of use of C2/C3, allowing for example game designers and artists to test their ideas in practice without extensive technical knowledge/coding experience.. Of course, being able to quickly try out/implement different mechanics is an invaluable tool for more experienced programmers as well.

it's probably worth mentioning the fast prototyping and ease of use of C2/C3, allowing for example game designers and artists to test their ideas in practice without extensive technical knowledge/coding experience.. Of course, being able to quickly try out/implement different mechanics is an invaluable tool for more experienced programmers as well.

Yeah. I didn't mention before, but the course is, actually, about fast prototyping with Construct and is mostly targeted at artists and game designers. So, people there already know the advantages of Construct for that kind of stuff.

Anyway, thanks for highlighting that. And thank you all for the insights.

Cheers!

Bruno, will you capture your speech and post it on Youtube?

Hey Apollo14!

Sorry for the delay in returning to you. I'm still waiting on the event organization to set a date, but I believe they intend to record the whole thing and post it already. When that happens, I'll let you know.

Cheers!