GeometriX's Forum Posts

  • In your event to detect "is in touch", you should create an invert condition "is touching object", with the object being the button.

  • You can get decent results using the plain old physics behaviour. Obviously you'd need to play around with the settings, but this is a functional, if slightly twitchy, abacus: here.

    Drag and drop the beads. You'll need to implement a system to keep the beads from going above their rows, since they can be freely dragged right now. I'm thinking a manual drag-and-drop solution instead of the built-in one (it'd be brilliant if we could get axis restrictions on the drag-and-drop behaviour, actually).

    It'd even be pretty easy to count the instances of the beads per row on the left or right of the abacus, if you're making an educational game.

  • Thanks for the feedback — You're right, the scale is wonky, and I do plan on increasing the size of the stations. I like your suggestion to give the impression that the taxi is a larger ship, though. It is meant to be larger than the little NPC ships, but maybe that's not coming across as obvious in terms of design. I'll definitely take it on board.

    In terms of touch screen support, I've actually been working on mobile as I go along, so there's a fully-functional touch interface right the way through.

  • Kyatric, do you know where exactly Node-webkit (and CocoonJS, for that matter) stores its WebStorage data? It's not in the exe's folder, that's for sure.

    EDIT: Or, wait, I think I found it: OS:\Users\"Username"\AppData\Local\"AppName"\Local Storage

  • I've been playing around with this fairly extensively and, indeed, WebStorage is the way to go. It even works with CocoonJS - after rebooting the phone, clearing web cache, redownloading the application - whatever you want, the data is still there.

  • Update!

    I've been tinkering with the visuals or, more accurately, working on an artistic direction for the game, and I think I've settled on one. It'll feature a retro sci-fi pulp magazine look: torn up, old, you know the sort.

    An example of some of my experiments (this is the Eden Project garden station from the second level):

    <img src="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14522925/Garden-station.jpg" border="0">

    I've also been working on the game mechanics, and I've now almost finished the scrap upgrade system. Basically, the player will find pieces of scrap that periodically appear during the levels. If they pick them up, they'll add to their scrap total. As your total scrap increases, you'll unlock access to bolt-on upgrades that act like perks, giving a variety of benefits to suit different playstyles and particular level challenges. You can only choose three at a time, and I think I'll have about 12 available in total. It's XP, really.

    That's about it for this update, which you can play here.

    Just one more thing to add with the upgrades and then I can start fleshing out a few more stages and creating more assets, working with this visual style as I go along.

  • Nice one, thanks :)

  • Honest opinion: I'm intrigued by the visuals and aesthetic, but if I downloaded this game as it stands now I'd uninstall it after about 30 seconds.

    The platform disappearing is far too quick. Now, this can be addressed easily enough but you should understand why it's too quick.

    I get that you want to challenge the player, but you need to give them some incentive to want to be challenged. At the moment the challenge simply outweighs the reward, so it becomes very frustrating very quickly. When creating tasks like this for the player to complete, you need to reward them heavily early on, and then make them beg for those rewards later.

    Get them hooked first - give them a little more to go on with minimal challenge. When they conquer those challenges they'll feel good about themselves. Keep the challenge level the same and they get bored, so you need to gradually increase it as the game (and rewards) progress, with a couple of brief difficulty spikes thrown in that the player will feel extra good about overcoming.

    Use the carrot and the stick. Too much of either becomes boring or irritating.

  • Care to elaborate? This is something that I plan on doing with my game but hadn't considered that the music would cut out between screens.

  • Thanks Po10c :)

    Yup, I'm definitely going to keep working on the movement; it's too stodgy at the moment.

    I plan to get pretty devious with the station docking. There'll even be some stations in later levels that require very precise manual docking.

    New version is up (same link): it contains a simple vehicle upgrade system as well as score tracking between stages. Saving and loading has also been implemented through WebStorage.

    My next goal is to implement a more advanced upgrade system that will be in addition to this system (kind of like perks from Call of Duty, with "XP" that you have to pick up throughout the levels), then I'll make the next three levels to complete the first chapter.

    After that it's improving the visuals and starting work on the user interface.

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • I've been dicking around way too much in my life and now it's time for me to start making games - what I've always actually wanted to do.

    Astro Cab is a project that I've been working on for a little over a month. It's basically the furthest I've ever got in developing my own game, and started as a project that I knew I could do entirely on my own as a means to learn Construct 2. It's inspired by

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    and

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    .

    It's still very much in development; I've just finished getting all the (very) basics done and I'm at a point now where I can generate new levels very quickly.

    <img src="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14522925/Astro-Cab.jpg" border="0">

    I aim to complete this game and launch on iOS, Android, PC, Mac and Linux, and maybe in-browser too if I can figure out a proper way to handle transcactions. At this stage, I think I'll attempt to sell it, probably for a dollar or two. Not necessarily to make money, but to make a game that people are willing to pay for. It's a small difference in some people's eyes, but it's one that matters to me.

    Current build can be played in your browser here [1.5MB; Chrome or FF is recommended]. It includes most of the core systems: briefing screen, vehicle selection and upgrades, two stages and a score screen. All visuals are still very rough at this stage.

    Very brief gameplay overview:

    • Cursor keys to control your ship. Space to boost.
    • Your goal is to pick up passengers indicated by the glowing green orbs, then drop them off at the red glowing orbs.
    • You need to hover near the pickup/dropoff for two seconds to complete the teleportation process. Breaking teleportation resets it.
    • Missing too many pickups or dropoffs during a level ends it.
    • Try not to smash into things.

    Input, feedback, bug reports - all are welcome!

  • My pleasure, Spider-Pig. See, we're not all bad people :P

  • Thanks Savvy001, that's very interesting. I'm not too keen on forcing the player to be online, to be honest, but if it comes down to it then I may have to.

    On a related note, I've done some basic testing with apps made in node-webkit and CocoonJS, and they seem to have some permanence when it comes to storing data. I'm not sure exactly how these wrappers deal with webstorage but they seem to store the data locally, outside of the scope of the system's web browser.

    How long that data will stick around for is still an uncertainty, however.

  • I posted an example capx for a request in another thread almost exactly like this recently. Since you've already got the sprites set up, it's just a matter of testing collisions, destroying and recreating overlapping instances.

    http://www.scirra.com/forum/on-start-of-layout-loops-logic-collsions_topic61745_post379018.html

  • Hi again, everyone.

    As I move through the development of my first game, I'm faced with challenges at every turn. Good challenges, and I can usually work through them, but one thing has been bothering me: saving the player's progress.

    My thinking is that I'll create an array that saves the player's current level, total money, unlocked vehicles, upgrades and so on. That's easy enough, but when they quit the game, that info is lost. I've had a look at webstorage and that seems to be a good way to record information, but I'm worried about the cookie clearing issue.

    I'm developing for iOS and Android (CocoonJS), and PC exe (node-webkit)

    So, my questions: What's the best way to permanently save information on both of these platforms? Is there an internal function that can do this on all platforms?

    Thanks!