mikehive's Forum Posts

  • mikehive put your info in your profile so I can check out your Steam games!

    Ah, thanks for asking - I've added my website to my profile, both of my games are linked from there 🙂

  • The aim of the showcase is to prove Construct 3 is used in industry, is a useful tool to raise/make money, and to show successful games. I think it does a pretty good job of doing this for the time being. In all honesty, I don't think it needs any other content right now but this might of course change in the future.

    Yeah, that's fair enough. Like I said, I understand. And I realise that a lot of games that look pretty good by themselves may not necessarily add anything worthwhile to a showcase (eg. you may find you have all the platformer examples you need, no matter how shiny...). I understand that game devs shouldn't take it personally if you don't feel inclined to add stuff to your showcase.

    I guess more broadly I'm just generally curious about Scirra's plans in the long term. Construct could totally be the next Game Maker in terms of public recognition - imo it's a fantastic piece of software, and I'd love to see it get there. But it'd need a bit of a kick with marketing and brand awareness and whatnot because, as this thread and the linked article have highlighted, a lot of game devs still aren't aware of it. (Certainly from my experience of chatting with other game developers, when they ask me what I use, I always end up explaining what Construct is as they aren't familiar with it).

    It seems like marketing in general isn't something you guys are strongly focused on right now - at least in terms of new strategies and such. Is that fair to say?

    Sorry... just being a nosy marketing guy 😛 You can tell me to go away or just ignore me if I'm being a nuisance.

  • We've tried more concerted efforts in the past at promoting people's games, but the truth is it's extremely time consuming and with minimal benefit to the game author as we just don't have much punching weight here. Engagement from our audience for this sort of content is generally minimal.

    That's a fair point, and I do appreciate that a lot of the time the things that people think will help their marketing don't do anything (retweets =/= sales, and all that). I understand where you're coming from.

    I'd only add the following two thoughts:

    1. "Punching weight" is relative. To a nobody dev with 12 Twitter follows, a signal boost from you guys could be a big encouragement and vote of confidence. It's not the same as getting written up in IGN or whatever, I agree, but it doesn't hurt to encourage creators who may be just starting out on their journey.

    2. Iirc the main thing I've approached your team about in the past is adding my games to your website, as part of the "look at the cool things you can do with Construct" type galleries. My games have pretty unique art styles (and universally positive Steam reviews, cough cough just saying), so I thought it might be nice for you to showcase the diversity of Construct products on your site (while also providing a nice bit of encouragement for me, if not actual marketing "results"). I understand that retweeting and social-boosting every random Joe who bombards you with requests doesn't really do you any favours, but I must admit to being a little disappointed to be given a (polite) "go away we're not really interested" when trying to contribute something that might actually benefit you in a small way. Fair enough if you don't want new examples for your site, I guess.

    Anyway, I got over it 😛 But it seems to me that a big part of making Construct a bigger part of the game dev consciousness is having a broad stable of awesome, creative, unique games to showcase. Surely?

    With absolutely no disrespect intended to Aurelien Regard (I think his game looks amazing, actually) - your website's front page is covered in shots of The Next Penelope. That came out in 2015, haven't we got anything newer to show as the poster child of Construct?? He even made it with the previous generation of the software (C2). I would submit to you that your community of users have been extremely busy producing weird and wacky things over the past six years - why not feature somebody new?

    They say that games sell consoles, and I think the same must be true of game creation software. People want to know: what can I make with this? What have people been able to do with Construct? The proof is always in the pudding, and all that.

    Anyway, I'll stop waffling. I really do love Construct and I wish more people used it. I just can't help wondering why they don't.

  • Construct is still a pretty niche option among the big hitters in the game dev world, unfortunately.

    I've wondered before why this could be the case given that Construct has been around for over a decade (I work in marketing, what can I say, I always wonder about why things are or are not popular!).

    My theories are:

    1. Construct has several limitations that may prevent it from being seen as a real contender or otherwise widely adopted by all and sundry. Eg. 2D only (well I know it has very crude 3D features but you know what I mean), no console publishing, JS-based game code that is open to anyone to look into (I know you can minify/obfuscate it, but still, how many devs want their source code/logic to be just publicly available by default?), etc. The result is that many professional devs will use Construct to prototype but then switch to a 'real engine' to make the game proper (eg. Ori and the Blind Forest was prototyped in Construct before they went on to build the full game in Unity). Why is that?

    2. Lack of superstar projects made with Construct. I think this is partly bad luck on Scirra's part, although maybe a little bit partly not. I mean, look at Game Maker for example: Undertale, Hotline Miami, Hyper Light Drifter, Spelunky - some of the most famous and lauded indie games of all time. People have made great things with Construct, but few 'household name' titles. How many can you name that the average gamer would be like, "Oh, I love that game"?

    Now, it's largely out of Scirra's control what people happen to make with their software, and it's out of their hands what happens to it in the marketplace (they have no way of making anything go super-viral, or whatever). However, as a creator I have found repeatedly that Scirra's support for indie developers when it comes to helping publicise projects made in Construct has often been minimal and the vibe I've gotten from them has been general disinterest. I've reached out to them for help multiple times (literally only small, 5-minute favours) and been given excuses and basically no help at all. Well, maybe my projects suck and they don't deserve limelight (that might be true, I don't know). I would be curious to know if any other published devs have a perspective on Scirra's helpfulness or not re: helping to showcase their work.

    I know Scirra have no obligation to help anybody with their marketing and they can do what they like. Fair enough. It's on me to do my own marketing (and I do). But I do wonder why they aren't doing more to push the really cool things people do with Construct, since they have a major lack of "star projects" that really put C3 on the map.

  • How advanced does this need to be? Do they need to be able to jump to different platforms? Or just run towards you when you are on their platform?

  • That link just resolves to the Game Jolt homepage for me. Am I missing something?

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  • I think this is a good idea. You should post it on the official suggestions page and see what the devs think.

  • Thanks for taking the time to reply - I appreciate it. However, I must admit I was hoping for answers other than "it's a headache" (yes I know that 😛) and "you shouldn't bother trying to do this in 2D in Construct" (seems a bit defeatist?).

    Is there really no good way of doing this? I find that unlikely. It seems like it would be some combination of clever logic, y-sorting and layer manipulation. I just can't seem to think of the perfect mix. 🤔

    Thanks for trying anyway.

  • Hey guys. I've been wrestling with a tricky problem and am wondering if anybody's got any bright ideas.

    I'm working on a 3/4 perspective top-down game (eg. like A Link To The Past, or Stardew Valley) where the perspective is faked by sorting objects by Y value (a pretty standard technique to allow the player to walk in front of / behind trees, rocks, coins, etc as necessary).

    This is working well, but now I'd like to add elevated platforms... and I'm getting confused.

    I know a lot of old 2D games would completely fake the effect with art (eg the "elevated" parts wouldn't really be elevated, they would just be drawn to look that way):

    The reason why I don't want to do that is that in those games, the back wall of the cliff would be a hard barrier that you couldn't walk behind, which kind of breaks the visual effect imho.

    Ideally, I'd want the player to be occluded behind the cliff when standing behind it, but also to be able to stand on top of it - and to have all other game objects correctly Y-sorted at the same time.

    Here's a (very quick and scribbly) image to illustrate what I mean (objects drawn in red would be subject to Y-sorting):

    I considered making the cliff with its 'elevated' ground a separate layer above the normal ground layer, and moving the player object between layers based on invisible triggers when they enter or exit the ramp. Then each layer would have correctly Y-sorted objects at each level of elevation.

    Except that wouldn't work for Y-sorted objects on the ground plane that would need to occlude the elevated ground (such as the foreground tree in the illustration above).

    Another option might be to do everything on the same layer, but treat the cliff itself (or at least the back wall) as something that itself needs to be Y-sorted. I don't think this would work as Y-sorting is based on the y-sorted object's origin point, so anything "on top" of the cliff (such as the coins illustrated above) would be liable to get sorted behind the cliff since the y-value would technically be lower than that of the cliff base. And so on.

    I really have no idea what the best way of doing this is and would be extremely grateful to anybody who has any ideas?

    Many thanks...!

  • You just need to make a new global variable (eg lastLayout) and store the name of the previous Layout in there. Then use that to go back :)

    On Press S Key: Set lastLayout to LayoutName, go to Shop

    [on Shop screen]

    On Press Space Key: Go to Layout (By Name) - lastLayout

    🙂

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  • This might be a bit of weirdness between C3 and your art software. I believe Photoshop and Chrome may have their own separate colour profiles for example (this definitely wouldn't be the first time colours have looked slightly different inside or outside of Adobe software).

    You may want to look into the colour profiles used by your pixel art software and whichever browser you're running C3 in - this may not be C3's fault (?).

  • There's a million reasons why your game might be running slow, so you'll have to do a bit of diagnostic work to figure out what the problem is.

    If you use the Debugger, you can see your CPU and GPU % uses. If one of them seems much higher than the other, that might tell you where you need to look.

    If CPU usage is high, there is a problem with your event logic that is slowing things down, or you have too many objects in memory.

    If GPU is running high that means it's a graphics problem. Either your graphical assets are too big, you're using too many effects, or some other rendering problem.

    Let us know if you are able to find any more information about where the problem might be (or tell us some more information about your game, post screenshots / cp3 etc) and we can help you figure out how to resolve it :)

  • You probably need to add a "Run once", or test to see if the music is already playing. What's happening now is that is that every frame, the game is checking to see if play=1, and then playing the music. Every frame (because play still = 1 on the next frame, and on the frame after that...). Hence the horrible output you're experiencing!

    You need to tell it to check ONCE, or stop checking when the music is already playing.

  • Do all of the sprites need to get blurry at the same time, or one by one?

    If they're blurring together at the same time, it might be best to put them all on a layer together and apply 1 blur effect to the whole layer (saves you a lot of time, and much more GPU friendly).