Jayjay's Forum Posts

  • I can't remember the exact chip model, but yeah a Yamaha chip is exactly what the Arcade soundtrack is aiming for ( made by the Maldita Castilla musician Gryzor89 )

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  • Hey all!

    We have great news, the Construct 2 prototyped game Battle Princess Madelyn is not only Greenlit but also on Kickstarter right now!

    http://www.battleprincessmadelyn.com/

    We've rebuilt the entire game in Unity and have been having a blast with lighting and other fancy FX

    Thanks for all the positive feedback, we really appreciate fellow Constructors' support and kind words along the way!

    For anyone interested in giving the game a play, we have a Pre-Alpha Build up on Steam!

    http://store.steampowered.com/app/603930

    Thanks again to the C2 community for their support through the journey thus far

    -Chris and Daven

    Causal Bit Games

  • rexrainbow Well, it's all JavaScript which can be viewed by opening the web console / inspector, so there's really not much he can add that someone else couldn't make themselves for C2. Only the editor-side things (eg: not things the player of your game will ever see) are what can really change as C3 develops.

  • rexrainbow same runtime, different engine in terms of it's much more open thanks to being purely in the browser / a new SDK for plugins.

    Also might be helpful: this free online tool makes it fairly easy to edit arrays, and other fancy JSON data things as well: http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/

  • I don't think Scirra is trying to offend existing/past fans and customers, they just need to entice people to continue purchasing Construct 2 until Construct 3 comes out (after all, a sudden hiccup in any income, even if they're doing really well, is not preferred).

    The 50% off is a loyalty bonus to existing customers who already are enjoying the product they purchased (C2), the 100% off first year for C2 purchases is to avoid people deciding not to buy until C3 comes out.

    Personally, I think it makes sense for Scirra to target new audiences more heavily, as C2 users are probably going to stay with C2 if they're happy with it, and the way Construct has been designed up until C3 has been "get as many people to buy as possible", while C3 will finally have a business reason for keeping existing users using their product (as that will lead to renewed subscriptions every year, and hence a guaranteed income).

    It's a whole new audience/market for them to tap into really, but so far it looks like they'll be continuing to appeal to both audiences (past and future)

    C3 is an editor-only upgrade, aside from some helpful build services, and so you're not really missing anything to stick with C2. You still get one of the best editors to make games in, and are still at the mercy of third party exporters and runtimes when trying to play said games

  • Burvey thanks! and yeah, I think it's made a bit harder to see due to the black background, will keep it in mind for future videos!

  • Finally can show a small portion of our experience so far:

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    <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_razz.gif" alt=":P" title="Razz">
  • The title is pretty intense so I wanted to step in to say I think Scirra can be trusted to strive to develop their best game editor and interface for 2D games yet, even more so thanks to its ability to give developers more control over the interface (since it's an unrestricted JavaScript + HTML5 environment there shouldn't be much off limits to developers of plugins).

    The runtime is the same as Construct 2 for now and the foreseeable future (HTML5), so if you are happily using Construct 2 right now, then you'll be able to continue enjoying that with Construct 3, with a paid subscription fee per year.

    So yes, they're being pretty up-front and trustworthy, eg: they're not promising "Switch and Nintendo 3DS export!" or "Xbox One and PS4 self publishing!", or anything too crazy to actually expect decent outcomes from using HTML5 (although WiiU doesn't support WebGL, and it should be stressed how big of an impact that makes on scope of games capable on the console). So export-wise, they're pretty clear that it's web-based.

    All the third party exporters and plugins aren't made by them, so they can't promise that it'll work 100% of the time, and since that's their demarcation point then it's just a matter of whether each user personally wants to take the risk on using an exporter. As long as the risk is made clear before purchase, that could be considered fair and, again, trustworthy!

  • ErekT Godot is pretty good for 2D already. Haven't had any luck in 3D, but Godot 3 does look very impressive.

    Any chance you were using JavaScript in Unity? I find the JavaScript editing to be painful because it has poor code highlighting and almost non-existant code completion (whereas C# is awesome with Visual Studio Community 2015, installed by default now).

    Also, there are plugins for Unity like PlayMaker and PlyGame that give two unique ways of doing visual scripting as well (PlayMaker like Blueprints in UE4, PlyGame like Scratch/maybe at a stretch of the imagination like Construct)

  • I'll post here since I was referenced above by ErekT and feel everyone wondering about this should have a chance to hear it:

    damainman and I both made Insanity's Blade, and the HTML5 prototype for Battle Princess Madelyn in Construct 2. We were both big time fans of Construct since Construct Classic where we both were working on various projects of our own (and we even met on the Scirra forums!).

    If you went back in time, maybe even around when we were just Kickstarter funded for Insanity's Blade, and you had told either of us that we would be leaving the wonderful editor style of Construct (either Classic or 2) to program in C# (not even .NET but Mono C#) within the Unity game engine, I don't think we would have believed it (especially given that Unity was not free -with most features- for <$100k devs at that time like how it is today).

    However, continuing on from a post that damainman made here: petition-to-include-built-in-exporter-compiler-in-constr_p1099702?#p1099702 , we have been building evidence that this is the right move for our company and our future games.

    This breaks down into many reasons:

    1. Native feels much smoother than HTML5 ever did, even on low-end hardware running the native version, VS mid-level hardware running the game in HTML5.

    This could be explained away by someone else as "bad events", but realistically C# is so much easier to do wrong (eg: object pooling is a must!), so I don't buy that because we are literally getting better performance with the same two people making the code (although Unity does do things fairly differently to C2, sometimes better, sometimes worse since it's both a 2D and 3D engine).

    It could be down to the engine differences instead though, which is where in Construct 2 the platforming behavior and collision systems always seemed to feel off when compared to Construct Classic let alone Unity.

    Our take-away learning from this experience is don't use the built-in platformer behavior or trust the collision system in demanding games (eg: almost all enemies were platformer behaviors in Insanity's Blade for example).

    2. We want real console support. WiiU without WebGL is a gaming laptop without the GPU, and the Switch doesn't even have a browser at release, so who knows when that might happen.

    3. Some of the most important things actually are easier with code. One thing that I felt Construct always needed after hearing Ashley think about it was the "behaviors made with events" part. Families often felt like a kludge and picking errors would drive us insane/create a great deal of event duplication.

    4. Pretty lighting and shaders. The community around Unity is so large now that you can pretty much find the resources and guides to do anything you want. There's also a great asset store for when you can't exactly make what you're looking for or someone else has done it better/for less time cost than you doing it personally.

    Here's a gif from the Unity version with rain, lights, fog/mist, and lots of particles in action in Battle Princess Madelyn: https://twitter.com/CausalBitGames/stat ... 5139837953

    We haven't actually lost any performance here from using these either, it's sometimes even a net gain when compared to the performance losses of the bare-bones HTML5 prototype running on JavaScript through a modified version of Chrome / Node Webkit.

    5. Simple native APK export. This doesn't apply to Battle Princess Madelyn, but I have to say it's amazing when I can export a Unity project to my phone and have things almost run at the same quality as on my laptop. I click "Build & Run" and it shows up on my phone ready to go. (Currently developing an Android VR game for my thesis project at University)

    but this doesn't mean it's for everyone! Construct 2/3 is still incredibly quick to edit when doing things that it works well with, and HTML5 isn't too bad of a way to share your creations with friends.

    It's also still great for prototyping, understanding and learning basic game logic in schools for young audiences, maybe developing some non-game HTML5 apps (partially, sometimes pure HTML5 code might work better here too), and throwing together quick-and-dirty mini games for fun. I think this all points to meaning that Construct 2/3 is great and intended for hobbies, not full commercial titles on the scale of other indie titles like Hotline Miami and Owl Boy.

    Unity is notably not-so-quick to develop with, but it's a pretty fair trade-off for games that actually run nicely across most pieces of hardware we've tested (even a tiny GPD WIN runs the game well!).

    I could imagine it's somewhat (or maybe even "quite a lot") harder if you don't already understand some forms of code/C# in general, but I noticed it was pretty quick to pick up and work with.

    Will this work for anyone else? It depends. Unity has its own known bugs and new bugs each build. Normally nothing too bad but still possible to run into from time to time if you try to stay up to date. It *also* has a team of hundreds of people though, so they are very rapid on the repairs! <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_razz.gif" alt=":P" title="Razz">

    We wanted to make a serious indie studio with our games, and we knew we needed consoles to do that, so for us that's what matters most right now. I hope that sharing our experience helps! <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

    As a personal aside: If Construct 3 had an exporter that dumped out a ready-to-run/export Unity (Godot? or some other engine with modern console support at least) project I would say "Great! Most people can now stay with Construct if they already know it and like it", but I don't know how feasible that would actually be <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_surprised.gif" alt=":o" title="Surprised">

    Then again, Clickteam has the Chowdren third-party exporter which looks pretty neat...

  • thanks for the well wishes! We'll have some more news on our game & our experience with porting from the C2 prototype to native soon (spoilers: it's good)

  • Couldn't have wrote it better! This is the killing feature! This would define Construct 3. This will kick the ass of all the other competition if there is any. If Construct 3 can directly spit out APK / IPA file and handles all the signing keys both for googleplay/appstore. I don't care if it has a 2-3 days processing (reasonable fee for every export) if they do it manually by outsourcing to a cheaper center or creating ties / interface with Intel or Adobe or Ludei. The $99 price is a steal comparing it to https://cocoon.io/pricing and https://build.phonegap.com/plans, of course doing it by yourself via IntelXDK is always free.

    I wouldn't say this "kicks the ass" of the competition, but would be needed to put Construct 3 back into the runnings as a serious game development tool (I can export a signed APK straight from Unity, not just as a debug version).

    It might not be native, eg: can still use a wrapper, but one-click export would be a very important step like you say

  • It will be interesting to see how they find the experience of using Electron/NW.JS to export a big project (Construct 3)

  • Yeah it's okay, the plugins in C3 will be installed in the "page" rather than the Chrome browser itself (I imagine some sort of drag-and-drop, or maybe even a copy paste or Asset Store like Unity has )

  • Not to mention SuperPowers is a whole HTML5-based editor for much more than games too (but is also a cool way to make 3D games in real-time collaboratively with many users at once working on the same or other projects on a server).

    It was fun to toy with on mobile + Xbox One, but more of a "that's neat" or "debug help" than a must-have feature.