The water reflection is basically just a one line shader. For each pixel you just go to the corresponding pixel on the other side of the surface and pick the color. To create the small ripples you just add a simple cos(...) calculation which is based on the time passing (global variable seconds) and multiply it by the distance to the surface, thus creating bigger waves the further you move away. And in a second step I create 100 of my 8 frame (if I remember correct ) single color, single animation water ripple sprite upon start of layer at random positions and store away the original x position and set the width of the sprite to be a multiple of it's y distance to the surface, thus making the ones closer to the bottom bigger and the ones closer to the top smaller.
In a foreach loop of these ripples I just say that their x position is their original x position times the distance of their y position to the water surface % screenwidth, thus making the ones in front move faster than the ones higher up. I was inspired by the water effect in Kingdom, which I liked very much.
These two effects combined create a very neat water surface with comparatively very little hardware impact. I guess the second step with 100 water ripples etc could've also been solved via a shader and a layer ontop of the water with it's own texture that increasingly stretches pixels in width the further down we go in the image, but I didn't want to spend too much time on it, as this effect was reasonable fast enough and my laptop has more cpu processing power than gpu power
As most hardware intensive tasks in this game are basically just bound to the amount of particle effects I create, I'll implement some options which will allow the user to turn the count of effects down for better performance on lower-end hardware Also most calculations are not dt based, so this game most likely will run too fast on 120fps... or is there a 60fps cap in Construct 2/WebGL?
When I'm done with the game I could write a proper tutorial with screenshots for this type of stuff, but beware, I just started with Construct 2, so maybe I'm wasting rendering power with my approach. I was just happy that my effect runs well enough on my laptop, so I stopped investing any further time in performance tuning.
And I'm quite happy with the development performance in the last few days myself. Since I received my key I was able to weld the pieces together and add quite a lot of "game".