AllanR's Forum Posts

  • Thanks for reporting back! and a big congrats on getting your game greenlit!

  • The response is good on the Simon game (the FPS was pretty low but it was playable - averaged around 11 FPS), and going back and trying the kids band the second time was better than the first time I tried. FPS were higher (40s and 50s) and there was very little stuttering when the different parts started or stopped like the first time - the response was pretty good, but only the top half of the buttons were showing at the bottom of the screen because they are too far down - and that makes it slightly hard to press them...

    the connect the dots had the same problem with things getting cut off at the bottom of the screen. I could do the drum, but I could not get the guitar started because the first dot was off the screen.

    For the most part, the games were playable. If the FPS wasn't showing, I would have thought things were a little sluggish at times, but not too bad.

    I don't have enough experience yet with mobile to offer any suggestions - other than keep things as small and simple as possible...

    and I would expect using cocoonjs would make things run a little faster from what I have read on other threads (if you can get past the bugs).

  • I tried it on my iPhone 5 (running 6.1.4) and it runs fairly well. the title screen and lobby start off slow but quickly recover and get up to 60 fps. The puzzle game goes down to 6 fps while I drag pieces around, and goes up in the high 40s the rest of the time.

    the maze runs at 11 fps. connect the dots around 16. the music game (my favorite!) starts around 50 fps, when the music starts it drops to 16 - and there is a slight stutter as the different parts start or stop.

    The animations look great! you are off to a great start - I am sure kids will love it!

  • Requiring two controllers sounds awkward and even future limits your audience.

    Maybe you could synchronize the movement of the platforms... then one controller would be feasible - and would make the keyboard a more viable alternative as well.

    The best way to find out is test out a variety of game mechanics and get feedback from real players before you get too far. Adding keyboard support really shouldn't affect performance at all.

  • From what I have seen Ashley say before, C2 heavily relies on Microsoft libraries that make porting it virtually impossible at this point. He has FAR more important things to work on right now.

  • My advice would be to try a few smaller games first. That will help you perfect game mechanics, learn what C2 can do (and can't), learn what it takes to take a game to completion, start to build a name for yourselves, learn what it takes to get your game into players hands, etc.

    I was just watching some great videos last night about some of these subjects - in the first one the guy talks about how his first game took 4 years to develop and completely failed. The second game was very successful because they knew what not to do (I bet they wish they had those 4 years back!) So learn from other people's mistakes, and then try to work your way up by not biting off too much all at once.

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    This second video has great information on how to market your game with little or no money. Again, starting small and building a fan base, developing relationships with reviewers and other people in the industry will greatly increase the chances of being successful!

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    good luck with your game! <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

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  • I don't think off screen objects get rendered, so there is not much of a performance hit to have them around (but it is still having to loop through all of them every tick and calculate their position).

    If you delete all the ones off screen you may also be deleting new ones you are setting up to scroll onto the screen. So, you may want to do something like Sprite.X < -100 then sprite Destroy.

    (obviously you have to factor in the width of the platforms to make sure they are completely off the screen)

  • well, I recreated your project... and I could not get it to fail. It worked just the way you wanted... and I tried several variations.

    I added Drag and Drop to the blocks so I could move them around to see how they were stacked.

    I also added an animation - grey for the bottom layer, white for the top, to help see which blocks are which.

    And I added a text box at the top of the screen to display the block coordinates when you click on it or move it.

    My first thought when I started was that your sort routine was not working the way you expected. You sort on arrayZ, but the 25 blocks that make up the upper layer could display incorrectly (like in your picture) if you don't also sort them by arrayY - because the blocks with a lower arrayY need to be behind the ones with a higher arrayY. But, like I said, it worked fine for me when I tried it.

    I am using the latest version of C2, so it could be an issue with an older version - where the ambiguity of just sorting 25 blocks with the same arrayZ gives a random order or something like that...

    anyway, try my version and see what happens. you can get it at:

    http://www.rieperts.com/games/forum/Blocks.capx

    In my version, if you press A it creates another set of blocks using loops rather than the array. But that way also worked as expected.

  • For sprites that you want to rotate to various angles (like your SpikeGunSpike object), zero degrees is pointing to the right. Your object is drawn pointing straight up - so it is always 90 degrees off from where you want it to point.

    All you have to do is open your object in the image editor, click the button at the top that says "Rotate 90 clockwise". Then when you rotate the sprite it will be pointing in the direction you want.

    (your code works fine, it is just the image that is off)

  • I agree, tenbolts, your game looks great - and runs pretty smoothly on my iPhone 5.

    Ashley, well, that is good to know, and doesn't surprise me too much - because everything else in Construct2 is "very carefully designed".

    It is possible that my results were more imaginary than anything else. I started with someone else's project that was not working very well, and I cleaned up the code, added parallax scrolling, completely changed the way the background was looping, etc. By the end it was working much better - but still not perfectly smooth. Some day I want to try Cocoonjs (and other wrappers) to see how much that helps (or not)...

  • I was doing some testing along these lines a month ago and figured it was mostly garbage collection to blame.

    Things did seem to improve when I made as little garbage as possible.

    What I did was create all objects before the game started, and never destroyed ANYTHING. I kept everything I wasn't actively using just off screen, then moved them into position when they were needed, and moved them back off screen when they had been "collected". That way, while the game was running, no new memory was being allocated to create objects, and none was being released to destroy them.

    I didn't test on very many devices, and haven't had time to dig any deeper into it since then, but it definitely seemed to help!

  • Thanks! this is very helpful.

  • you could use a variable "Position" to hold the current index. Have it start with a value of 0 (at the top of the array, or bottom - depending on how you want to look at it).

    Then if you press the down button, subtract 1 from "Position, then check if it is less than 0, if so set it to 9.

    If you press the up button, add 1 to "Position", then check if it is greater than 9, if it is then set it to 0.

  • The way I usually handle that is to use an invisible sprite for the player - to keep instance variables, the position on screen, and keep all the events as simple as possible. Then you can pin any sprite you want on top, change animations as necessary, etc...

  • jhonathan Ibanez, I just checked out your website now. The Zombie game is very good! The graphics look fantastic. I guess you know the Credits button and Options button don't seem to do anything...

    It also took me a while to figure out that there were power-ups available. I like the way you use brains as a type of radar to show that zombies are coming.

    Very good job!