How much can you do with only 50 events!?

Woof. What a weekend.

A little background on me. I've done some game dev before, published a small game on iOS.

Recently, I bought a chromebook because I liked the form factor and the insane battery life. I mainly used unity3D for development before, but projects seemed to become unwieldy and I'd lose interest. Unity3D doesn't run on chromebooks natively (there's a linux workaround, but it takes a monstrous amount of memory and I bought a cheapo model that has about 32 gigs).

Eventually, I found out about construct, and decided to give it a shot. Loaded up a tutorial on youtube, and started in earnest. It took me about an hour to overcome the initial learning curve, and soon after that I was off to the races. I've been using it for about four or five days now, and what an experience. There's been a few moments of frustration, but for the most part everything is incredibly intuitive.

Construct 3 is like an answer to my prayers. It hits the triple point of ease of use, technical ability, and accessibility.

I quickly decided to undertake a project to see what I could do with the free versions 50 event limit. You can check out my project here:

gamejolt.com/games/domina/669582

At first I thought I had made it with 49 events. You'll probably notice there's no way to get any points, and the item box never has anything in it. I may remove them in a newer release. There's also a handful of bugs and things that don't work as expected. These could easily be remedied by adding a few extra events, but I'm fresh out. Still, I've managed to create a castlevania like with different levels, three different monsters, music, sound effects, and more. There's even parallax...even though it may not look like it at first.

My hat is off to the team at construct. I'm probably going to collapse for a few hours, but I plan on buying the business license when I come to.

If anyone was wondering what you can get done with the free version...the answer is quite a bit. You have to be economical with your scope and how you use your events, but if you're on the fence and you're into Pixel Art or Retro Style games you do not need to look any further.

Good effort!

Neat.

I made a 3D game using Construct's new 3D features with only 50 events, also on a Chromebook. Five levels, multiple enemy types, key/door system.

It really forces one to think efficiently.

construct.net/en/free-online-games/vault-peril-32857/play

This looks cool. Maybe try the Scan Lines effect to recreate that C64 feeling :P

This looks cool. Maybe try the Scan Lines effect to recreate that C64 feeling :P

Thanks!

Now that I have the paid version I've spruced it up a bit, and i'm going to experiment with having scan lines and having an options menu to enable and disable them.

Funny story though -

I was trying to figure out how to add a scanline/CRT type effect and seemingly EVERY response was how to add the effect on Construct 2, and mentioned that those effect packages are deprecated. I was getting incredibly frustrated and eventually made a reddit post...and then I found out that it's part of the default effects packages! I deleted that post within a few minutes of making it, lol. I do like the scan lines, but the bulge effect has some pretty nasty artifacting that would make it undesirable in an actual release. A shame, I do like that rounded CRT look. I assume this is because I'm using such a small resolution.

Glad to know there's more of us that want an environment that doesn't feel like we're coding in a world made of cardboard. Keep up the solid work, looking forward to your success!

Thanks so much! I've almost got the prototype to where I want it to be, although I'm going to leave the original up in case anyone would like to see what's possible with only 50 events.

I do value the time I spent with Unity3D, even though honestly I spent way too long with it. I learned a lot about how code works and how to set up certain triggers and manipulate variables. I learned how to "Think in code", so to speak.

That being said for 2D pixel art type games Unity offers too MUCH freedom. You spend a lot of time trying to lock the engine down into a mode that resembles what you're looking for. Construct is so far ahead it's ridiculous. It's also pretty fun to use. I used to have to force myself to code an hour a day on Unity and I couldn't wait to be done wrestling with it. With Construct I sit down and the next I thing I know it's two hours later.

I once had the idea it would be pretty nifty to have a "50 events or less" game jam. I recall Scirra had run some contests in the past with licenses as prizes.

If you know what you're doing and make good use of behaviors and conditional expressions, I'd say pretty much any classic arcade game could be recreated in 50 events or less.

So I've purchased construct and iterated over this, you can try it out here:

gamejolt.com/games/dominaC64/670081

I didn't see a way to edit my original post, or I would have thrown it up there as well.

So if you're keeping score out there, the original version used all 50 events: this version uses 84! The last 5 percent of the game took almost as many events as the first 95 percent! Still, a little polish goes a long way. I could have expanded on the gameplay, but I'm going to save all that for the full version. I had really thought this was going to take me a few more days, but I ended up spending about 5 more hours or so on it.

So as someone pointed out above, this is a very similar style to a commodore 64 style, and that's on purpose. I used the C64 palette in pixel studio. In the commodore 64s hi-res mode sprites can have one color (although they can be layered, which is why Luna has a three color sprite) and background cells can have two colors. So there shouldn't be anywhere that you can see more than two colors in the same 8x8 cell. It was a fun little restriction, but it is INCREDIBLY difficult to design single color sprites that read well without an all black background - effectively cheating so that your mind will read some of the pixels as black instead of transparent. So I won't be sticking with this style for the full thing.

If you're thinking of messing with construct - or you have messed with it and you're thinking of buying a license - I invite you to take a look at this little project and see what juice the extra squeeze is worth!

Ages ago I made a 1 event game to show someone how much you can do without events. Not super pretty but proves a point.

1drv.ms/u/s!AkmrWgxeuxlKhIcokRqagDXIMwyuHQ