jakobdam's Forum Posts

  • Really cool art, Valerien!

    My character art varies a lot; sometimes I do pixel, sometimes chibi, sometimes manga...

    Much of my past game art is propriety owned by the company I made it for, so I won't show it here. But here's a few examples of some pixel art I've made during my education a looong time ago:

    [attachment=0:23g2vfe8][/attachment:23g2vfe8]

    Originally meant for creating a web comic, I'm now considering to use these two OCs for a game (along with more of my OCs):

    [attachment=2:23g2vfe8][/attachment:23g2vfe8]

    [attachment=1:23g2vfe8][/attachment:23g2vfe8]

    • The character "Sophie" is heavily inspired from Marvel's Runaway-character, Molly Hayes.

    I'm also considering returning to vector.

  • Well, we're talking about a scrolling platformer; the main difference between Sonic and the vast majority of platformers, is the speed. It's a very essential game mechanic, meant to combine "chaotic" and "lucky" elements, with skills and "know-how", to provide fun. The placement and types of powerups, obstacles etc. all evolves around this game mechanic.

    To make a good non-fast platformer is of course possible, but everythink will have to be rethought; what will the new challenges be etc. - and I'd maybe look at classics such as Super Mario for inspiration here.

    Btw. - if you can make a slow platformer, you can make a fast one too - in Construct 2, it's simply a matter of putting a multiplying factor on your movement speed. BUT some performance issues may arise when the speed is increased by so much.

  • [quote:169i77nq]

    hobbyist game developers think it will be cool to make a game, and life gets the better of them, and they cancel their subscription after 1st month (because its hard, takes time - etc).

    But they will surely choose the free version anyway, and already there, find out the limits of their available time and skills. They will not throw € 100 for a personal license anyway. And noone says it should be possible to cancel after 1 month; typically, you're bound to the subscription for ½ - 1 year.

    [quote:169i77nq]

    Unity understands that people don't stick around, that is why there rental plan is the way it is - good business! not a joke. Which is why they have longevity.

    Well, in my view, it's not a good business if people don't buy it at all, and instead opt for the one time fee. If noone buys in on the subscription, then there's no reason for having it, and all maintenance costs for this business plan turns to expenses without any profit to counter balance.

  • Have you looked at my capx...?

    Because I do chain (and spawn for that matter) one color at a time, in the event sheet - but I'm not entirely sure that what I've done, is what you mean...?

    About particles spawing; what would you suggest as an alternative to spawn/destroy them...? Or did you mean to decrease the number of particles seeded/spawned for each "explosion" (this I wrote a little about under my section "Performance" in OT...)

  • inquiesco >

    Typically, a subscription license will not require cloud-based pings EVERY time the software loads. Only once per week or so (this can be varied as needed).

    IndieKiwi >>

    The same would apply to "can I profil from my graphics I made in Photoshop CC if I cancel my subscription?". The answer is yes, but you'll have a heck of a time to edit your work without the subscription...

    DUTOIT >>>

    UE4 is indeed very new, and the business plan is a leap of faith for EPIC. But their plan has merit; I think it'll prove to generate much larger income than the traditional business plan of UE3.

    UNITY's rental plan is a joke, known throughout gaming communities to be so. There's absolutely no benefit to renting over buying with the ridicilous high price for renting.

    But Adobe and Microsoft have both had huge successes with their plans; Adobe with their entire collection of software, and Microsoft with their Office 365 and OneDrive.

    Why should such a business plan fail for SCIRRA (except if they execute it as clumsily as Unity Technologies have done)...?

  • I think this will answer your question:

    scirra.com/tutorials/1032/g ... creen-play

    Download link is on the left.

    Edit:

    Damned I can't post links yet. £$!

    scirra.com/tutorials/1032

    grappling-hook-example-capx-splitscreen-play

    => Or you can google: construct 2 split screen

    • It should be the first link to pop up.

  • Here's my upcoming chain reaction game.

    It's very early in development, so there's only placeholder graphics for the most part.

    I also supply the .capx here, for everyone to use - feel free to use the embedded graphics too (not that there's much to use, but I won't mind if you do). ^_^

    Link:

    jakobdam.dk/0-GAME-DEV/ZooFlu

    Target platforms

    • HTML 5-compatible browsers (preferrable WebGL enabled)
    • Mobile devices (preferrable WebGL enabled, but Canvas must work satisfyingly on current generation midend-highend hardware)

    Performance

    • Runs smooth right now, even with particles being spawned so much
    • Even better performance can be archieved by limiting the particles seeds
    • MUCH better performance can be archieved by removing the rotation (but this has a huge visual impact)

    Known bugs

    • The score is not updated correctly; something is wrong, and I haven't quite figured out yet what it is. 90 bubbles are spawned at launch, so if you clear the level, you should have score 90. This is not the case; what happens is, if 2 or more are triggered at the exact same time, the score is only added once. Or so I think... I need to investigate this.

    To do

    • A lot. Levels, game over conditions, level completed conditions etc... there's a lot of preparations for these things in place already, so it shouldn't be too tough a job to do.
    • Graphics, sounds and other resources (maybe change the font)
    • Game/level balancing, story etc...

  • Making the game free on app store, play store etc. has huge benefits - also economically.

    There're 2 viable business plans for making the apps free - and they both have much larger potential for increased income, compared to if you charged xx dollars per app download.

    First; make an estimate.

    • How many would download your app if it cost 10 US dollars?
    • How many would download your app if it cost 1 US dollars?
    • How many would download your app if it was free?

    Of course, these numbers can be skewed a lot by proper marketing, viral trending, sheer luck and other mechanics - but still. I guess we can all agree that the free app/game would be downloaded much more. The question is; how much?

    The estimates I've seen, has en operating factor of x10000 in difference between the cheapest cost for an app/game, and for the app/game being free.

    So if your app/game would be downloaded 20 times at the cost of 1 USD, we're talking 200,000 downloads if it had been free.

    TYPE 1: Advertising

    • Put in commercials.
    • If your app is popular and people actually keep using/playing it, you will generate a lot of views.
    • Your will gain a steady income, even from having made your work available for free.

    TYPE 2: In-app purchases

    • This can be tied with advertising; an in-app purchase can be for the commercials to go away.
    • Several things, such as power-ups, new levels etc. can be made in-app purchases, and thus provide you (the developer) with more reason to update with high quality content.

    Just make sure you don't make your free game a "pay to win", as this is £$! annoying, and people (especially gamers) are becoming increasingly more sensitive to this business model.

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  • First; I don't know if this is the correct forum for this topic. If not, I apologize

    • This is just an idea; heavily inspired by the great success Adobe and Microsoft have had with subscription licensing their products. EPIC have done the same with their Unreal Engine 4, which can be acquired for only 19 $/month (and 5% of your earnings for whatever you end up making with the engine). Especially EPICs plan is SO attractive; whereas before, only AAA-titles could afford a license; now - everybody can afford it.

    It's not that € 100 is a high price for Construct 2 personal license; but imagine for a moment we were talking maybe 5-10 euros per month for the personal license, and 20-30 euros per month, for the business.

    User benefits:

    • A much smaller front-up payment.

    Scirra benefits:

    • Much larger income, and more of a feeling of actually getting paid for new updates
    • Better tracking with usage patterns etc.

    There's so much potential for making several extremely good and tailored business plans for Scirra; but maybe the entire idea of a subscription goes against their business ideals...?

    Or is this just nuts...? What say you...?

  • I don't think it's possible as such, but you can make x frames and select different ones for your sprite. If you need the sprite to also be animated, then replace the entire sprite with another one with a different color, which spawns at the same coordinate while the original is destroyed. It's not a pretty solution, but it's a workaround...

  • It'd be easier if you had some examples of what type of app(s) you want to make.

    If you want to access fx. the mobile phone's camera, bluetooth, contacts, calendar entries, photo album etc. - then you probably need the developer's SDK, and to program it all in fx. Objective C for iOS.

    But if you want something lighter, say, a small calculator, an app for displaying non-dynamic content etc., then Construct 2 could actually do the job for you.

  • Spriter is a program, dedicated to drawing and animating. As all programs, it requires that you can draw - although a lot of free graphics is included with Spriter.

    One of the smart things in Spriter, is the IK solvers; bone rigging - which means that animating the movements of a character becomes FAR easier.

  • That would also be my recommendation; Bootcamp and a newer Windows (7 or 8.1).

    To virtualize Windows is a messy thing, and bound to give you frustrations, and 50 shades of grey hair...

    The major drawback is that you'll have 2 very separate eco systems; OSX and Windows; and there's no fast way to switch between them (it will require reboot each time). Therefore, choose a Macbook PRO with SSD harddrive, to ensure that the reboots will happen much faster.

  • Hi all - and first of all, thanks to Scirra for the awesome Construct 2, and also thanks for all you guys for contributing to the forum.

    I started programming Pascal and assembler back in the old DOS-days. Remember DOS? 256 colors with the standard IBM driver? But my 'puter had 1 MB graphics card, which meant I could run 16-bit (65.536) colors. And so I made my own special DOS-driver, which enabled me to utilize this vastly larger color space - WHILE still being in DOS-mode (no cheating using Windows 3.11 stuff).

    As time went by, I jumped on the wagon of developing J2ME games (java to micro edition); midlet 1, 1.1 and 2. I remember this as being much, much easier than dealing with stupid Pascal.

    Then my attention turned more towards making graphics and music, and as more years passed by, I decided to make my games with ActionScript in Flash. As I wanted my games to work on the smartphones which were available back then (those were pre-iPhone days, so in my area, this meant Windows Mobile phones; primarily from HTC), I had to use AS 2. No fancy AS 3 for me...

    As HTML 5 and its canvas element, and most importantly WebGL showed up, I became very intrigued. I'm a web programmer, dealing primarily with PHP/MySQL for backend and xHTML 1.1 (strict) and HTML 5 for frontend. Naturally, getting an HTML 5 framework to do future games with, seemed like a good option.

    As I own an iPhone and iPad nowadays, I also want the games to be as cross-platform as possible.

    And so, I googled, and I found... Phaser. Built upon the extremely fast PIXI.js-engine, Phaser seemed like the best choise. I decided to make a "Flappy Birds" clone, and did so in less than 4 hours. This may not sound that impressive, but I'm primarily a graphics artist, and I also had to read some £$! documentation to use Phaser. The next day, I ran into a world of problems... semi-transparency (8-bit alpha in PNGs) doesn't work properly. Neither does collission detection on pixel level. And worst of all; "resize to fit browser window" cannot be done either. Well, there're workarounds for each of these problems, but if the framework doesn't do these things out of the box, it's a very bad sign in my opinion.

    Having read about Construct 2 and lots of other stuff, I decided to give Construct 2 a spin. First of all, because I've read about the connection with the primary competitor (Game Maker) and the pros and cons of each, but also because of the great reviews from non-programmers and programmers alike - especially reviews from mid-2013 and onwards.

    My experience with Construct 2 so far, has been so overwhelmingly positive, that even though I probably should've kept using the Free version for a few days more, I decided to buy the Personal License today.

    So - two days ago, I downloaded the Free License - and began working on a remake of my Flappy Birds clone that I'd already done in Phaser. I didn't have any time yesterday to work at home, so this little pet project has taken about 10 hours in total. This includes learning and a lot of googling, some trial and error, testing on PC/iPhone/iPad and performance optimization.

    I'm extremely impressed at how easy and how WELL it all works - far, far better than anything I'd dared hoped for.

  • Cool beginning - do mention the controls (WASD) on the intro screen or something, as many will probably be using their arrow keys...