Where is a good place to fully learn how to use Construct 3?

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  • I tried looking up tutorials on youtube but I run into nothing but the same copy & paste tutorial "How to make a platformer game".

    No matter how many times I watch another one I never learn anything, it's always the same ultra basic tutorial where they just show you how to add a sprite to the scene and how to make him move.

    How do you actually make a full game? How do you make something, that's playable?

    How do you visually script the actions you want for the games you're trying to make?

    Like let's say I wanted to make a top down 2D Battle Royale game.

    How would I create a zone? How do I create an inventory system? How do I display the amount of people still alive? How do I create a random RNG system for loot?

    How do I play a separate animation when I shoot? How do I create a melee attack?

    How do you set up hitboxes? How do you make a game over screen?

    The visual scripting isn't explained very well, I just feel like a madman entering words into the event page and praying it works but it never does what I want.

    I've had Construct 3 since July and have learned nothing.

    I want to fully learn the engine... or get a refund but that already got denied in August xD

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  • Hello everyone, I'm a beginner developer, help me. Where you can find all the hotkeys for construct 3, just creatiCtrlng a game will be so much faster.

  • Hey!

    Don't give up sir. It is all about getting into problem solving mode, and breaking things down. Just like any coding, only we have more tools at our disposal here.

    Example: what is a "zone"?

    A zone is just an area designated by you. Can be anything. A sprite, an array. X and y.

    Best to just use the software, tinker! Don't be afraid to test things out!

    Try to break things down, talk out loud or write down the problem you want to solve!

    I talk to myself alot while coding.

  • I'd say one helpful thing is to understand a few fundamentals in Construct 3, and I'm not talking about the typical "add the platform behaviour and you're done" kind of basics.

    My suggestion, is to get VERY familiar with some common objects, such as:

    Arrays

    Dictionarys

    9-patch (useful for HUD elements, things like square windows, or when a highlight box appears if you wanted to click and drag to highlight units on an RTS game)

    And familiarise yourself with concepts in the event sheet view, such as:

    For loops

    For Each loops

    Expression

    Sub-Events

    Object Picking

    Without writing about literally everything in Construct, I'll go on about Arrays and Dictionaries for an inventory system.

    Before reading the below, if you don't know what arrays and dictionarys are, I'd suggest reading the documentation on Construct 3's website about these two objects first.

    So, Arrays are an amazing way to setup some data that you can read or write to - it would be good for storing the information for an inventory system, as you can have your array grown and shrink depending on what items are picked up ingame, or if an item is used. Arrays can be setup to store information about each inventory slot such as "quantity" and "damage", and you can then design your events so that when you "use" an item, it doesn't just delete the item from the array, but it would first check the quantity, subtract from it, and if the quantity was only "1", THEN it can delete the entry from the array.

    The above is a random thought idea for designing an inventory system - you could design an inventory system with a Dictionary object instead, but you may find there are pros and cons to whatever choice you make. Dictionary objects are kinda similar to arrays, but they are maybe "easier" to use, but come at a possible performance cost if you add thousands of items, or there may be a "management" cost if you wanted to be able to store lots of details about each item slot (an array you could simply "delete" the item slot in 1 event - but with a dictionary, you would need to loop through every key and find anything related to the item slot, e.g. If you named all your item slot dictionary keys like "slot0_Name", "slot0_Quantity").

    As you're new, I'd say try and familiarise yourself first with the concepts I listed at the start of this post, don't worry so much about performance right away, but worry about getting things to WORK correctly. Once you're more aware and feeling more confident, then you can start thinking more about performance, which is another entire thought process, this comes from lots of reading and experimenting, for example, you'll come to find that "collisions" are quite expensive for the CPU, so you will want to design your events to not check for collisions every moment, but instead try and hide the collision checks away in sub-events and make sure other easier checks are done first, or maybe disabling collisions for objects that don't need checking at the time, etc.

    And honestly, in general, keep reading the documentation often, Scirra have done a great job at writing everything down about literally everything within construct 3, like last year I was casually reading about the "Touch" object, and I found out randomly by reading on the documentation that there is support for "pen sensitivity" - how cool is that!? It works with my Note 9 S-Pen. Nobody ever really talks about that on the forums, but it's really useful to know what capabilities Construct 3 has. Scirra have also written some tips and useful info on pretty much every page on the documentation, sometimes they write warnings like "try not to use this object for blah blah, instead, use blah blah" it's super useful stuff!

    ALSO I'd suggest googling small questions you have, followed by "Construct 3". Such as "is it better to use array or dictionary construct 3". By doing a search like this, you might find older posts with people discussing these concepts indepth, and you might find a useful piece of info or two! Be aware of the date of the forum post though, as it might be a really old post and may be irrelevant these days.

    You could find tutorials that provide the c3p file on the specific questions that you asked, such as "how do I make a inventory system?", then you could open these up and try to read the events (hopefully there are comments in the events too!), and if unsure about an event, you could poke around the event, change a variable or disable an event or action, to see what it changes - once something breaks, you'll realise "ohh that one event was to prevent blah blah from happening" or "oh this event completely breaks the inventory, so it must be important". If you get completely stuck on what something is, you can always post on these forums and see what the community thinks!

    Hope this is useful in some way!

  • No matter how many times I watch another one I never learn anything, it's always the same ultra basic tutorial where they just show you how to add a sprite to the scene and how to make him move.

    How do you actually make a full game? How do you make something, that's playable?

    How do you visually script the actions you want for the games you're trying to make?

    Like let's say I wanted to make a top down 2D Battle Royale game.

    How would I create a zone? How do I create an inventory system? How do I display the amount of people still alive? How do I create a random RNG system for loot?

    How do I play a separate animation when I shoot? How do I create a melee attack?

    How do you set up hitboxes? How do you make a game over screen?

    One of the important things you're highlighting here is the difference between what you want to create (inventories, etc) and how to create it (event sheets, layouts, etc).

    How I learned was by drawing out, with a paper and pen, what I wanted to create. An "inventory" isn't just an "inventory"; it's a grid, with 16 boxes, that can have an item in each box.

    Then you add the player experience: what you want people to do. In the inventory, players should be able to select different items, and see a description.

    What's interesting is now we need to draw two more things on our piece of paper: a cursor (for the player to select items), and a text box (to show the item's description).

    Pick your favourite game and break it into pieces like this. Draw out other inventories and see what they created. Or levels, characters, bosses, weapons - it's all the same. Just a bunch of little pieces that add up to something greater.

    Once you go through this a few times, you'll have a piece of paper with everything you need to create, and what it's supposed to do. Now you can go figure out how to create it in Construct.

    You can look at the included example projects, and find ones that already have things you're going to create: cursors, text boxes, grids, etc. That will show you how to create those in construct. You can also look up tutorials. But between the amazing C3 manual and the included projects, chances are you'll find examples of what the pieces you're creating.

    Games are just that - individual pieces. Like any program, you're going to need to understand the basics of Construct (event sheets, properties, behaviours). But after that, you're just making lots of little things that add up to something greater (and hopefully, fun).

  • editor.construct.net

    Then start building. Set a (small) goal of something you wanna make. Make prototypes. When you get stuck --> Check the documentation (https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/manuals/construct-3), check the Forum, try a google search, ask (forum/discord)

    That's how I did it, but admittedly it involves a lot of banging your head against walls sometimes but I feel like you'll encounter that no matter what.

  • DeerDeityStudios everyone learns differently but there are a ton of resources out there. Take a look at some of the Tutorial Courses, these are either text or video tutorials to make all sorts of different things. Plus Vimlark has a great set of video tutorials that includes a simple use for arrays.

    As for animations, have a look at some of the example projects on the Start Page to see how they've been set up - like this Ladder Climbing one for instance. Viridino Studios who make a bunch of them use a common method for animations which involves having two separate objects for the player, a square base and a sprite that actually animates. This old tutorial of mine covers that in a slightly more complicated manner, but it might help. If I remember rightly, the Monk Fight tutorial might cover 'Zones' too, but not 100% sure if that will be what you're looking for.

    As some of the others have said, just jumping in and trying things is a great way to learn. And writing down what I'm trying to achieve in the most simple manner possible (i.e. when this button is pressed > player walks forward, animation plays) can then help identify what events you might need.

    As an aside. vova777 please don't hijack someone else's thread with an unrelated question. And you can find keyboard shortcuts in the manual.

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