matthornb's Forum Posts

  • 14 posts

  • Nice. These are useful links.

    Is there any way to set up [paid DLC] using Construct 3 and Steam?

    I have yet to see a way to do so and if anyone has an addon that is actually able to make this work I imagine there would be a market for it here.

  • And what if my game has NO collision detection between objects, involved at all?

    Are there many tips in your eBook that can dramatically help in cases where rendering [not collision] is the primary drain on framerate and performance?

    I am looking at the eBook on the store, but if you don't have much advice on the rendering side of things then maybe this isn't going to be helpful for my current project.

  • I arrived at game development from a studio art and video production background. I have some technical skills but access to great, user-friendly tools like Construct 2 (for 2d games) and Unity (for realtime 3d games) is extremely helpful at improving a development process that otherwise would otherwise be far more difficult and would take even longer.

    I appreciate tools that streamline so much of the development process, that allow me to develop games in a way that is intuitive, and which allow for many cool features and a wide range of output options. But - also it had to be software I could realistically afford.

    Construct 2 provided exactly what I was looking for in a 2d game engine. This coming from someone who's tried others in the past (from GameSalad to Game Maker to Torque Game Builder) and found Construct 2 to be my favorite option out of all the software available.

    Right now, I'm trying to launch a smaller short-term project called Spiral Skies. If that goes well, I hope to complete a number of other projects in the next year or so, such as "Isola", "Vortex", and "Panoramic Worlds" (made in Unity) and "Vivid Minigolf" & "World Pinball" (I have made limited GameSalad test versions for both of these but I want to redo them both with higher resolution and much more content, in Construct 2.)

    I'd also like to launch an extensive library of old and new video projects, as well as some other projects. There is a lot I envision doing but a lot of it is ambitious and many of the bigger, more ambitious projects are likely to cost between $100 and $1000 to complete. So, if by some miracle I can pull off a success (in audience growth or sales or both) with Spiral Skies or something else soon, it could make a huge difference for me - I'd be able to get so many exciting creative things done!

  • I know we have blur and glow shaders already, and they've been around for a long time, but I would like to see some type of 'Quick Blur' & 'Quick Glow' that takes less processing time.

    Optimization is important and if there's a way to shave off even 10% or so of the slowdown resulting from these computationally intensive shaders without a massive loss of quality that'd be good.

    I tend to search the forums for keywords related to topics I'm trying to understand or problems I want to solve.

    Right now I am trying to figure out how to speed up a blur with a more efficient blurring shader. Because right now all the blur shaders I've tried have resulted in framerate dropping well below 60fps. (to 45 fps at best)

  • I'm bringing this thread back from the dead again, as I just now noticed it.

    A Newgrounds plugin for C2 sounds like a great idea.

    I'd already been considering Newgrounds but seeing this old thread did cement my decision to release my new little adventure game (Spiral Skies) there.

    So, thanks for the advice.

    I did look at Alexa rankings for the two sites:

    Kongregate is currently the 1608th most visited website on the internet.

    Newgrounds ranks 4100.

    I also checked SimilarWeb's rankings, which placed Kongregate at #1075 and Newgrounds at #2161.

    They also estimated 32 million visits to Kongregate and 18 million to Newgrounds, in the last six months.

    Kongregate has about 106,000 games.

    Newgrounds has a total of about 3300... but they also have some categories that aren't games. Videos, for example.

    I examined the ranking systems for games and I think it's significantly trickier to get noticed on Kongregate if your game isn't above 3.5 stars (A lot of games with lower user ratings fall through the cracks) but that Newgrounds makes it a lot easier for games with middling ratings to get discovered.

    My conclusion? If you have a truly exceptional game, and are really confident you'll be above 3.5 stars, Kongregate may generate a ton of attention for your work. Otherwise, Newgrounds is more promising. It is almost as popular and there's much less competition in the games category on Newgrounds right now.

    The Pareto principle, while a good rule of thumb, doesn't always apply. Kongregate heavily biases its results towards the most popular games, the 1-3% of the games submitted that can break through the clutter and grab attention and ratings good enough to be listed highly on a category.

    Newgrounds is a better option for decent but not outstanding games. You might actually be seen there with games that are good but not great.

    I'm releasing [Spiral Skies] on both in the next few days but now I'm thinking Newgrounds is a safer bet as I'm not certain that my project will climb above 3.5/5 on Kongregate.

    It could happen, but there's always a lot of cynicism and negativity on the internet so it is a hard thing to make something that is so good it will rank well.

    Some links and pics related to Spiral Skies:

    http://www.panoramicworlds.com/kompozer/html/spiral.html

    http://matthornb.newgrounds.com/

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  • I'm making a bigger (realtime 3d) first-person adventure game [Panoramic Worlds] in the Unity engine, but a lot of my smaller 2d projects are being made with Construct 2.

    Here's a 4-minute .mp4 production video for "Spiral Skies", a side project I'm working on in Construct 2 that I plan to submit to Kongregate in a day or two, and which I also intend to have on one of my websites.

    The prerendered game environments are being modelled with Lightwave, texture art done in Photoshop, with a bit of additional work also done in Blacksmith 3d and a few other graphics utilities including Shadermap 2.

    http://www.triumphantartists.com/videostreams/spiral.mp4

  • Is there a way to create free 'patches' to update an existing C2 game?

    That is, if I hypothetically had a 150 MB game (aimed at multiple platforms offline and online) at v. 1.0, for example, and I made a series of minor changes which only modified or added 5 MB of game data, would there be a good cross-platform way to release those changes as a version 1.1 patch/update without actually requiring players of the first version to re-download the entire game?

    It'd be nice for those players, if they could just download the 5 MB that has actually changed instead of having to re-download the whole 150.

    Now, this is not an issue for me right at the moment, but I'm in early stages of making a fairly large graphics-heavy C2 game and this is something that might end up being important to me a few months from now. You never know - players might discover a bug I miss during testing, and I might need to release a patch after that to fix it.

    I haven't seen anyone discussing how to do this, so I thought it'd be worth bringing up.

  • My name is Matthew Lyles Hornbostel, I'm a versatile artist based in the United States and I'm open to freelance gigs at this time. Will work for under $4/hour (exact terms negotiable, could be as little as $1.50/hour) on the game development project of whoever will hire me... my current skill set includes proficiency in traditional art media (pencil, pastel, paint, miniatures, etc) as well as skill in digital 2d art with Photoshop, and competence in video editing, compositing (in After Effects) and 3d art/animation with Lightwave/Blender. I have graduated from the University of Houston with Phi Kappa Phi honors and a degree in Communications/Media Production and a minor in Studio Art.

    I have (as of a few months ago) landed a limited part-time job and am looking to supplement that with a few hours/week of other freelance work for the next few months. If you have use for a 2d/3d artist, you can PM me and we can discuss your project.

    Many of my ongoing personal creative projects are showcased on

    www.triumphantartists.com or the assorted websites connected to it, though that site is in the middle of a messy reorganization at this time and a lot of what I've developed is not viewable there at the moment. I have dozens of past art projects still to upload there, as well as a bunch of ongoing efforts that will be posted in the coming months.

  • So much amazing stuff here. There are really a lot of talented Construct 2 devs in this community!

    Personally, I am not good at programming but am a fairly decent 3d artist. So my emphasis is on visually compelling games made with user-friendly toolsets (like Construct 2!)

    I've got a batch of smallish projects in development, and some of them will end up being made in Construct 2.

    I've got Vivid Minigolf (made with Gamesalad, though if I had a chance to do it over I would've used Construct 2), Panoramic Worlds (several versions of this including a limited one assembled in Construct 2), and a couple of small turn-based strategy minigames in early development in Construct 2.

    I also have a couple of fairly elaborate first-person game projects (Isola, Vortex) which might be assembled in Construct 2. I've basically been building the gameworlds on those and am wrapping that process up. I will need to start rendering out images and assembling them in a game dev toolset, and I'll need to decide pretty soon which toolset will work best for those projects. C2 is one of the leading contenders in both cases.

    Isola images:

    <img src="http://www.isolaiphone.com/Isola2.jpg" border="0">

    <img src="http://www.isolaiphone.com/Isola1.jpg" border="0">

    Panoramic Worlds images:

    <img src="http://www.panoramicworlds.com/promo.jpg" border="0">

    Isola Webpage

    Panoramic Worlds

    Other Miscellaneous Projects

  • Hello. My name is Matthew Lyles Hornbostel, I'm an artist who focuses primarily on video productions, visual effects, and video game development.

    I am not all that good at programming but tools like Construct 2, Game Maker: Studio, and Gamesalad are allowing me to accomplish things I wouldn't ordinarily be able to do.

    I have an experimental virtual-tour thing in Flash called "Panoramic Worlds" (www.panoramicworlds.com) and I'm currently porting it to HTML5 using Construct 2 and the awesome Lens effect, among other parts of the Construct 2 toolset.

  • Okay, I need to make this clear... I am not saying I'm making or have made the shaders I described. They're just ideas at this point.

    I haven't learned how to make [shaders] though I may try to if nobody else steps in on these.

    I am, however, suggesting that shaders like what I described would be useful to me if someone could assist me in getting them made.

    Also, one other item that would be useful for my project, not essential but helpful anyway - I'd like to see an offset wrap, as someone mentioned earlier in the thread. So you can wrap a single image in a loop, horizontally or vertically, without having to cycle between two copies of the same background object as the current wrap feature does.

  • I too would like to be able to skew, mesh-warp, or corner-pin a sprite, and am wondering if this could be done with a WebGL plugin?

  • I could use - and many others have requested it - a transform shader, i.e. a four-point corner pin for skewing surfaces. I'd also love to see some sort of customizable mesh warp, think a grid 3x3, 4x4, or 5x5, of points, where each point acts like a corner pin. So people could customize their distortion patterns in more detail.

    I also want these distortions to have an option to be able to distort whatever is behind them, even if the object behind it is moving. So you could have a distortion cast from one (partially visible or invisible) layer onto the layers underneath it?

    I have several projects - 2d with a few pseudo-3d effects, that would benefit immensely from these shaders. I am looking at 3d engines if necessary but if these effects can be done in C2 instead it'd save me a ton of time and labor.

  • Hi, I'm a C2 newbie... I have a project that requires a button to be clicked, that when clicked will look through the entries in an array, all of which are set to either 0 or 1 (i.e. inactive/active) and randomly pick one of the entries that is active.

    Then, take the array position of that entry and use that to set a frame on a sprite.

    For instance, if there's an array with a width of 5, (0,1,2,3,4) and they are set to values of (0,1,0,0,1)... it should select at random either array entry 1 or 4, and then set the image frame to frame 1 or 4.

    How can I do this? I've tried a bunch of times in various ways but it never works right for me.

  • 14 posts