planerunner's Forum Posts

  • [quote:3v3af83a]Yes, just up and down. Nothing else needed.

    Poifect.

    [quote:3v3af83a]if the background were a slightly different tint, it's make the player ship and the enemy missiles stand out more which would be not only good for gameplay, but look good too.

    Could you explain a bit more? Do you mean a different color (more brown, etc), or maybe lighter or darker?

    [quote:3v3af83a]also, on the subject of visuals, drop shadows for everything to show how high or not high up we are from the ground are always cool.

    That wouldn't be hard to add. One way would be to have a black silhouette sprite per enemy, cut the opacity, then make it offset from the enemy sprite for distance. I have to wonder if there is a better way tho. Like a shadow/light source? Will have to test to see how it impacts performance tho. I almost wish Construct's Drop Shadow effect had some settings. It's nice (I used it on the main menu, in fact), but limited right now. Anyone got any better ideas instead of adding an offset black sprite?

  • Now that I've gotten some feedback, I can go about making actual waves of enemies, so we can have some actual strategy! Thanks, very helpful! Also, I finally made something that has too many explosions? Awesome. Again, this was very useful.

    Here's a couple of questions:

    -Would moving up and down be okay, or did you need keyboard rotate/mouse rotate as well?

    -If you could have any power-up you wanted, what would it do?

  • Hey gang!

    I've been keeping my mecha shmup, Planerunner, under the radar until I could get something playable. Well, now it is playable!

    <img src="http://www.planerunner.com/bot_screenshot.png">

    Planerunner is my first run at a Construct-based shmup. Instructions are included with the single level demo (E for guns, W for homing missiles, left and right arrow keys to move). It is supposed to have approximately 5 minutes of game play. The full game will have 3 levels, or about 15 minutes of game play.

    Any feedback is helpful! The demo is beta - please post feedback and criticism here. Also, the website is still under construction.

  • You gotta expose this program a few places! I cannot believe you made this in Construct, that's . . . amazing!

  • Has anyone attempted to make a plugin for raknet? Would love to see this happen, if only as a possibility for indie use.

  • here's something for comparison. The closest piece of commercial software to Construct is Enterbrain's new Action Game Maker. These are the same guys who made RPG Maker XP, etc.

    http://www.actiongamemaker.com/

    It costs 9800 yen, which is about $99 US, right now.

    A few thoughts:

    -I discovered Construct and AGM at the same time while looking for shmup middleware. I use Construct.

    -Realm Crafter, AGM, and many other indie 'makers' that feature full 3D are topping off at $100 right now. I believe a finished 1.0 version of Construct should compete at $49 US. In fact, the devs could sell Construct through Steamworks if they want a secure way of selling, maintaining, and updating it.

  • np, sit's why I wrote the tutorial . . . so others didn't have to fight Construct in this one area like I did, back when I was just starting fresh. Multilayer parallax is basic, but it just does so much for a background. I just hope it stays out of same cliche as lens flares for photoshop. Too useful of a basic tool!

  • I thought I'd put up a short tutorial I made on multi-level parallax layers. This is for total, complete noobs, so if you already know about parallax, skip it. I made a tut with a few pics here:

    http://huzzah.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/100/

    Reposted here:

    [Parallax: Parallax is an apparent displacement or difference of orientation of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.]

    Now if you are anything like me, that definition just went about as far over your head as a Saturn V rocket. In plainer english, parallax is 3D depth of movement. An object farther away moves at a different rate than an object closer to us.

    Parallax in 2D games is a trick older than time. You use 3 (or more) backgrounds instead of 2. As the player moves through a level, each background layer scrolls at different speeds to mimic 3D movement. They don�t even have to be the correct speeds, the bottom layer just had to move at a slower rate than the upper layer. In Construct, this can easily be achieved with 3 or more layers. The beauty of Construct is that you are not limited by merely 3 layers. My space shooter�s first introductory level uses a layer for the player (hey, that rhymed!), 3 layers for parallax backgrounds, and a foundation layer to preserve our original scroll rate. So our layout is thus:

    1.player

    2.background1

    3.background2

    4.background3

    5.foundation

    The key here is scroll rate. In Construct, go to the layers tab and create 5 layers.

    <img src="http://huzzah.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/construct_layers1.png?w=500&h=375">

    Name them per the order listed above. Once you have them, set the �Scroll X Rate� and �Scroll Y Rate� for �background1' to 75%, set �background2' to 50%, and �background3' to 25%. Leave the �player� and �foundation� layers at 100%. To test this, add some sprites (any sprites) to each layer, add a test sprite to the �player� layer, and add an 8 direction behavior to it. Now test your game by hitting the computer monitor icon in the upper left, next to �File�. Boom, you can now see triple parallax at work. If you want even more depth, add more layers between �player� and �foundation�, simply adjust your scroll rates and you�re off to the races.

    The general rule of thumb is the very bottom layer and the very top layer MUST have the same scroll rate for this to work. It�s that easy once you know the concept. Have fun!

  • Whoa. So you can still use Steamworks, but not use Steam to sell it? That's a nice, nice option. So that gives you 2 main options:

    Option 1-Sell on Steam, let them take whatever cut Valve demands, and take advantage of Steam's marketing to potentially sell more copies than you could alone [From what I've looked up, it might be a 50/50 split) Option 2-Sell on your own website and likely sell far fewer copies, but use Steamworks for anti-piracy/digital distribution/data tracking and take all the money. Man, I like those options despite the warts. If someone gets Steamworks' API integrated into a Construct game, we ought to make a tutorial or a stickie on how to at least do Option 2. Preferably both.

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  • 'selling your game on steam isn't free'

    I knew they had to hit us somewhere. Any idea what the costs are?

  • Wow, hadn't seen THAT before.

    'Steamworks is entirely free. There are no licensing fees and there's no charge for bandwidth, retail copies, or OEM distribution.'

    Oh c'mon, pull the other one. How do they pay for this? And WHY would they do it for free? The catch is somewhere, just can't find it yet. NO service can run like that without someone footing the bill.

    Kay. Let me suspend reality a bit here and assume I can sell a game on this service. Has anyone using Construct attempted to integrate this in a Construct game? Anyone found any limitations or disadvantages yet? From appearances, this would seem like the ideal service to distribute with.

    -Free distribution

    -Free anti-piracy

    -Free multiplayer (how do you handle THAT with Construct?)

    Man, someone slap me with a 10 foot tuna and wake me up.

    [EDIT]

    Too late. Just read up on this on CVG. Yes, it is indeed free. You just have to contact Jason Holtman at Steam support:

    so they can provide you with info on how to integrate it. I always assumed I had to pay big bucks to get onto Steam as a software developer/publisher, so I never bothered to look. Color me impressed.

    I assume some of us have looked at this, or are actively trying to use it with Construct.

    -Anyone got an opinion on it?

    -How about sharing any experiences if you're using it?

    -Is the Construct team tempted to think about integrating Steamworks support into Construct?

    Hooboy.

  • 'If it is worth pirating, it will be pirated. No protection will prevent that, sadly, short of the most extreme and draconian protection schemes.'

    'I'd suggest that although you could add things like online verification or even an online check every time the user opens the program, even these could be engineered out the .exe by someone who wants to pirate it enough.'

    Hackable? Very, if you put in even modest effort. But that's the point. Most users are lazy and won't, but ALOT of users can and will try to copy via usb stick to a friend, etc. I'm not worried about chinese hackers that can crack Vista or XP here (I could only be so lucky!). We're aiming much further down the piracy tree.

    For the average everyday buyer there has to be BASIC protection to prevent simple piracy. Not very complicated, not even online verification. Enter a serial number 1 time emailed with your purchase, you play the game on that machine. Off hand, I think a basic example might use a hidden MD5 hash protecting the exe. But how to implement that? or something like that?

  • Welp, I've combed the forums over for something about this, but not finding much.

    So, here's a distribution/piracy question.

    Let's say I manage to make a game I want to sell. And I want to prevent it from being pirated. How would I go about trying to secure it? I've read up a little on MD5, and such. I know Construct generates a single .exe file. I figure a 3rd party installation program might be needed, but I wanted to see what solution Construct users have come up with (if any).

  • Hm.

    So out of the following options:

    -Construct can't do this yet

    -Construct can do this, but you have to use the source

    -I'm a total noob

    . . . it's 'I'm a total noob' for the win!

    thanks for setting me straight deadeye (loot: elite forum posting +10). Now to de-noobify my mouse cursor...

  • Okay, a somewhat simple idea continues to mock me. I've searched the forums, I've searched the wiki, I've hunted through all my example cabs. See, it's over in the corner, still mocking. Anyhoo, I'm trying to find a way to make a simple custom cursor for my game instead of the standard Windows mouse cursor. Yet, the closest I've found in my search is this thread:

    it mentions plugins. I can handle plugins. Plugins make my life easier . . . unless they haven't been made yet. Has anyone found a way (simple or complex) of putting a custom cursor over the windows mouse cursor in a Construct game? Surely there's a way to do this and I'm just being a silly noob.

    (see, it's still over there mocking me . . .)