How do I make a handheld LCD / Game & Watch game?

Are there any tutorials for making a handheld LCD game / Nintendo Game & Watch style game?

I have a number of consoles and would really like to replicate them as games in Construct but am at a loss.

If there is a tutorial available for this - similar to this but for Construct: youtube.com/watch please let me know. Or if someone would be interested in making a tutorial I'd be happy to Paypal you a few bucks for your trouble.

Thanks in advance :)

You can probably follow that tutorial to do it. Sure it looks different than doing it in construct but the variables and logic would be pretty much the same so it should be adaptable.

All you're doing is changing the visibility of sprites. And there are probably many ways to do that utilizing picking arrays or whatnot.

One way would be to take advantage of "pick nth instance" and the .iid expression.

So just make your layout and lay down the sprites. probably a sprite type for the player and each column of falling objects. Then then use multiple instances of the player sprite for each horizontal position and instances for the vertical positions of the objects. The order you place the instances will matter.

Anyways you could do the moving logic for the player movement like this.

global number index=0

every 1 seconds
-- player is visible
-- -- set index to player.iid
-- -- player: set invisible
-- key left is down
-- if index>0
-- -- subtract 1 from index
-- key right is down
-- if index < player.count-1
-- -- add 1 to index
-- pick index instance of player
-- -- player: set visible

Many thanks for the reply R0J0hound - much appreciated :)

I've recreated the tutorial in Construct:

dropbox.com/s/p1klz6zs4s84e4a/gamewatch.c3p

It's everything else that comes after - timing the falling objects, when they appear, adding a clock function, those kinds of things.

So if someone was able to do a full tutorial for an existing game (I'd be happy to do the artwork) then I could apply this to any other LCD handheld going forward since they (generalisation) pretty much all work along the same lines.

I’m unfamiliar with any games like that and tried to watch that tutorial but it’s pacing is pretty slow.

How it’s done is literally like making any game. The only thing specific to that game style is you just make things visible or invisible to show motion.

Key controls move the player.

Any text would just be a spritefont, or a sprite per character, or if you are feeling more ambitious, a sprite per part.

Then you have an update function that you call which with change what’s visible and check if conditions are met and whatnot.

At its core you have a player that has a position and a list of objects. They all have a location, which is just one of the sprites that can be made visible.

Every update you change the location and check if say the player has an object right above him.

Well I decided to knuckle down and give it my best shot, and three days later this is the result. It's easy to pick holes in if you look closely enough (and there are probably waaay better ways to achieve the same result than the methods I used) but I'm pretty proud of it since its the first game I've really got close to completing. There are some other bits to add, like a clock screen and the sounds need to increase in speed as score increases, but it's pretty close to what I wanted to achieve.

Thanks again to R0J0hound for the advice :)

milkstudio.nz/octopus (NB not https://)

Looks good to me. Good job.

There will always be things that could be done better in any project. The important thing is you got it to work. The more projects you do the better you’ll be at it.

Also I salute you for finishing it too. I tend to not to.