angstloch's Forum Posts

  • I'm struggling to build my first APK. I'm using Monaca, and managed to build a debug, unsigned version of my game. I'm having more trouble with the releasable build, but right now what concerns me most is that my debug build is, well, LAGGY AS F**K yo. I mean, much laggier than served from the web dammit. For some reason, I had expected even a slight performance improvement once i went apk, i dunno, being local and all. Certainly not this debacle. Oscillations of speed are painfully noticeable, and makes the game unenjoyable :(

    Here's the debug build if you wanna try it yrself and see how it sucks.

    Im following this tuto here. Monaca has evolved a bit since, but the only thing I couldnt find was one ¨Crosswalk WebView Engine¨ plugin (crosswalk is not maintained no more right?), that was advised. I don't know if that's relevant.

    Any idea where the problem might be? Capx code flaw? Lack of some plugin?

    Thanks!

  • Lol damn right we're oldcshool. And getting older by the day. Me, i thinks i'm even getting less and less "schooled" too :P Chowdren, eh? I need to hv a look at that. I need to have many looks at many things indeed. Thanks, man. Merry christmas and enjoy yr holidays! :)

    Game update: zzzzzz...

  • yo NetOne cheers brother! good to see some oldschoolers around :D everything's so changed round here. tried to check what you've been up to of late but i don't really get on too well with this new site yet (well it's not "new" anymore is it). your wisdom is always welcome :)

    Now that we're at it, not a lot of people really seem to stick to Construct innit. I'm more or less aware that it's got it's limitations and all -- yet some people seem to overcome them and ship beautiful games. Im always just before the "overcome" part, which pisses me off cause it really seems like the perfect software for me (code-silly as i am). Anyway,

    Im currently struggling with this Monaca thing (some kind of alt coccoon.io as far as i can figure), trying to get the game into Android. that'd be my first :S And leaderboard aint working, down at the arcade (ha!). I really, really hate them leaderboards. Further name changes not ruled out. I'll be back with new tides.

  • So! Changed game's name, tweaked it a bit (not enough), and kicked it's butt to itch.io and the arcade. A small step for a man.

    This is fun to make and gave me some interesting ideas, although I think I really should keep distances with registered IP if i develop it further. "Prototype", is the word.

  • Beautiful artwork indeed. You mean, really hand-painted?

  • Hehe fair enough. But that's a big answer you asking for... and Im not myself that savvy.

    You should learn at least a bit of html (dead easy), css (the design part), and javascript (the only real progrmming here, the other two are more like layout languages). The old classic way was the w3schools.com, but there should be thousands of alternatives nowadays. stackoverflow.com is also very useful, more like a Q&A forum.

    Here's a very old mockup I had somewhere, is only half sketched but will do as an example. (Not a very good one concerning txt blurriness, cause I used some css text shadow I think. And also seem to take ages to load. Oh well). I seem unable to write a link properly in this damn forums so here's the address:

    WEB c2web.netlify.com

    The capx ( drive.google.com/open ) is unimportant here, it only contains the animated background, and this following line of code:

    which calls the function “carga()”. But this function is not inside the construct project...

    When you export a html5 project from C2, what you get is a webpage containing your game, like this:

    ZIP drive.google.com/open

    The file index.html is always the start (in this case the only) page in any website. Here is where the game “happens”. And here I built a simple structure, with a menu on top and some text in blocks (called “divs”; mind the text is not in the capx), and made the game “happen” in the background. You can edit html files with any text editor, but there are many (brackets, notepadC++) specially designed for coding. If you open index.html you'll see this structure, and also that “carga()” function that I called from inside the capx. What this function does is set the whole content (the aforementioned “structure”) visible, as I set it invisible by default. Why? Cause I dont want the text being shown while the game (the background of my site) is loading. Similarly, you can call a Construct function from the html (change music or images when a link is hit, for example). Functions are a straight way to interact capx and html, and a very powerful one too, as they let you do nearly anything.

    I've used myself construct to make simple presentations and portfolios, but those were no webpages – I rather called them “online apps”. And people seemed impressed lol.

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  • EDIT AGAIN: Changed game's name because whadehell.

    Okay so against my better judgement I've decided to give this goddam program another try. Thus I've been rummaging over some of my old sad half-done projects, seeing if I can rig 'em up a little bit and, who knows innit, maybe get them finally published alright. Not gonna happen most likely, never happens -- anyway, today I give you

    TETRAPACMMATON

    PLAY HERE:

    pac.netlify.com

    A revamp of my old PacBoy (itself a revamp of Namco's Pac-Man) with a hint of colour, plus shooting turrets, giant saws, secret hatches and whatnot.

    It's a pretty polished beta, with nearly all features functional. Could use a bigger, more balanced map. Also, grid movement is not as robust as it should, enemies go thru walls sometimes, which pisses me off greatly. TETRAPACMMATRON is aimed primarily for mobile/tablet, but as always with Construct, performance is quite the challenge. As it is now, runs reasonably well on all my rather-crappy devices. Far from optimal, of course. Lags a bit too much at the beginning, which I hope I'll be able to fix with a title screen or something.

    Comments appreciated! How's performance for you? What scores you get? Do them damn ghosts cross the walls? Do you think Namco could sue me?

    Cheers!

  • Well, well. Although i do think Construct could be effectively used for web-design, I'd advice to stick to a good old html boneframe to lay out the general structure, have some divs for texts and so -- specially since you are using (actually mimicking) a very classic, left-side menu template.

    You can use functions to interact the html with the "game". For example, get your content hidden with css and when the "game" is loaded change the css with a construct function. You can do that!

    Having the whole thing in construct has some problems. Searchability apart, texts tend to look blurry, you can't copy things, etc.

  • What makes it feel a bit sluggish is not really the speed of the game i think, rather the speed of the background. Try and make it move faster -- even if you have to ad some extra-reglamentary lines.

  • hey that's pretty addictive. Even for me, whos european and knows nothing about american football. That's a good mechanic: a small (time-wise) challenge you need to complete in order to face another challenge -- the touchdown (which btw is so frustrating

    (graphics are provisional i hope)

  • Errr i'm having some problems to get beyond the GET THE BALL screen. Managed somehow once (and was quickly tackled down) but can't replicate it :/

    ------

    EDIT:

    You can use arrow keys to move player but double tap on player to start.

    That dumb I am.

  • Pandadoor

    —

    Thank you for your comments and feedback, brothers. Small update to fix a couple of things:

    • As Pandadoor noted, the Plymouth tended to take off and fly at certain point, this was due to a bad collision shape and should be fixed now.
    • I took aut the powerups. They were definitively confusing, plus they ruined to an extent that glorious feeling of your car actually falling apart on the go, not knowing if it's gonna make it to the finish line. Most likely there will be some powerup in the future, but i have to think about how to present them in-game.

    I've been working in this game some three weeks, but the idea and even the preliminary design of some cars was made in some remote past (as hinted above). It's a project I've always been thinking around, kindof lazily. Look, for instance, these were done I think a couple of years ago:

  • A lot of things are done every tick and saving an expression to a variable is negligible in my opinion.

    And trust, your opinion concerning physics and C2 is more than enough for me I tend to overworry with performance (just at the end it often seems that i hadn't overworried that much after all).

    Nevertheless,

    It is an artistic judgement call to determine what that damage looks like, and In the end, this is a lot more important than the math.

    And that's so very true too. In the game's current state, collisions are destructive or not on a purely random basis... and it looks pretty good, curiously -- it's all fast and dirty and plain dumb luck does not look too weird or outta place. As i'm trying to introduce some maths (and so calculate real forces), well... let's say it needs a lot of tweaking still. If the force is a square it gets a bit too, hum, nonlinear -- results are so volatile. I'm experimenting now with other values, even if that's not so realistic. But i'd lie if i said the lazy random solution aint tantalizing...

  • Oi this seems to fit perfectly in the Iron Kiss universe, both aesthetically and thematically. The Pandadoor Mythos?

  • Feels solid. Gave it a few tries and found it physically flawless. I suck just like i suck at real pinballs ;P