thomasmahler's Forum Posts

  • Haha, yeah, there are a couple of silhouette-style games out there now. Limbo has definitely influenced me, even though it never was finished. Patapon also was a nice experience. And then there's a shortfilm called Jasper Morello which just blew me away.

    I'll try to give the whole thing my own twist though. The main idea was to come up with something where a simple plate could be created in under 10 minutes (the woods plate I posted didn't even take 5 minutes for the pure creation part) and where I could implement 3d elements without having to go through the whole production pipeline (fixing UVs, texturing, etc.) - so you could create animated 3d elements in a very, very short amount of time.

    The beauty of the whole thing is that I can simply concept everything in photoshop, create some dynamics like animated grass in Maya (even though the sprite editor is still really cumbersome when it comes to importing animation frames, hope the next version is better in that regard) and simply layout everything in Construct where I can still play around with layers and parallax scrolling and so on, to give the level compositions way more depth and believability.

    After working for quite a bit of time in 3d, I SO love this workflow, it really helps staying focused on what's really important, you can make changes really quickly, etc. - it's just freaking awesome.

    I uploaded an early composition test I did two weeks ago here:

    http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/corrupted_01.exe

    Move around with the arrow keys, jump with Z, Tab to go to the next layout.

    Keep in mind that the style wasn't yet fully worked out, so it looks a bit clunky. Still, I do intend of using simple brush strokes to suggest environmental elements. It's almost like you can storyboard a game while the engine is simple enough to create the game while you're going. Lovin' it!

    Oh, and I temporarily used tracks from the Princess Mononoke Soundtrack to set the mood

  • This is a reminder/poke at David, who's the only one who can do them.

    *poke*

    QFP.

    Quoted for poking.

  • Been working on something...:

    http://thomasmahler.com/images/corrupted_01.jpg

    I was looking for a style that wouldn't take too much time to create, yet still had an appealing look to it. The nice thing is that I can mix this style with pre-rendered 3d and dynamics and just pop it all into Construct. It looks a bit better in the actual game where everything is on its own layer, simulating depth.

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  • Also, it'd be great if we could 'hide' objects in the layout editor. So we could select an object and press H to hide it and if we wanna unhide it shift + H. A lot of times it's a little cumbersome right now to organize things, especially because of the ordering.

  • Would be cool if we could simply select a couple of objects and press CTRL + G to put them into a folder. That's how you put layers into a folder in Photoshop or group objects together in Maya - would feel pretty natural.

    To follow deadeyes thought: If nothing is selected and I RMB - create new folder, I'd have a clean, empty folder. If objects are selected and I RMB - create new folder, the selected objects should directly go into the folder.

    A little streamlining goes a loooong way into making the app easier to work with

  • Nah, no problem, I'll tell you before my host is gonna kill me, but I think we should have more than enough bandwidth

    I'll keep doing these vids once my new project is a little more... presentable. They're fairly quick to do and will probably help new users get into the app really quickly - together with deadeyes platforming school thingy and the wiki itself.

  • The rotate behavior's speed is a float, so you should be able to give it a decimal value.

    If I set the speed to 0.3, the value automatically jumps to 0 and the object won't rotate at all. If I set it to 1 it rotates, but it's a tad too fast.

  • Wow, this'd be awesome to have built in as a behavior! This is really cool stuff.

  • Yeah, I definitely think we'll see things like that pop up using Construct pretty soonish.

    Construct already is capable of handling all the graphics with parallax layers and transparency / motion and all that kinda stuff, it's still a bit of a pain in the cashews (heh, I like that ) to work with animation though. The easier it'll be to bring detailed animations into Construct, the more gorgeous the games will look like.

    I'm currently working on something really interesting, but the bugs and crashes keep the pace down. Also, there are still some workflow issues that probably stem from the app still being in its infancy when it comes to indie development and having to be pulled through a whole production until it's really stable. I'm talking about things like running a layout to just check a certain part of the game and Construct not loading the global objects or generally not being able to organize things properly at the moment - things that might not be completely obvious at first, but bite you in the nuts when you're actually dealing with it.

    I think it'll be really interesting if we mix and match the mediums to get the most ouf of what construct has to offer. I'm doing full 2d now where only the characters are 3d and rendered out with an alpha channel, so I can import the sprites into Construct. I think all of this will lead to some pretty interesting results.

  • 22) Option to include objects set to 'global' when I only run the layout.

    Say I only want to use one audio object and only one keyboard object - If I then 'run layout' (to just test the second level), the objects that were used in a global way won't work anymore. The 'audio' object won't play music and the controls set for the keyboard object won't work. Yikes!

  • 21) Another thing that'd be really awesome to have:

    Say I'm working on a 2d platformer and I have some layers with parallax scrolling to give the game more depth. So I also want to put a couple of bigger trees in the foreground. When I move the character directly behind those trees, I can't see the character anymore - so that's the problem.

    Say, one of the sceneries is that the character runs through woods and is being attacked by enemies. It'd be really cool if we could have an effect or whatever where the engine would detect this event like:

    "if sprite is covered up by something else, start drawing an outline that's visible through everything"

    That should work for whatever sprites we throw this effect on - it should draw the outline on the topmost layer, so that you always see what's going on, even if you're completely hidden behind an object. Otherwise, we'd have to completely get rid of foreground objects that could potentially hide the player or enemies, which would kinda suck.

  • Run layout in the project tab?

    Yeah, that works, but only if I have Construct running and only if I have the cap and all the resources. Now, what if I have to send the exe to someone else to test it? If I export to exe, there's no way of specifying what events it'll run, so I'd have to change the project itself in order to export the exe with just the second level of the game.

  • 20) Would it be possible to add more control to some behaviors? Like, I have a big Sun-like object in the background and would love to give it some motion so that it's not just stuck up there. So I thought I"d give it a very slight rotate (behavior), but even at Speed: 1 it's too fast to be believable. It should be something like .3 or so.

  • 19) Is there a way to toggle layouts? Like, say I wanna let someone playtest only level 2 of my game - As it seems, right now I'd have to delete the first layout completely and create the exe with the game starting at layout 2 - is that correct? That's quite a biggie.

  • I tried that and also thought that was it, but does it work for you?

    I have added 'bullet' and 'wrap' to the clouds object (which is a tiled background) and set wrap to wrap everywhere - But the clouds still just leave the screen on the right and don't reappear on the left side.

    Edit: Oh, okay. I tested it with a black box and it works. But I guess it only starts to wrap when the whole object left on the given side, right? So for my clouds, I just have a huge ass transparent tiled background and wanted Construct to show the pixels that leave on the screen to the right immediately on the left side of the scene. As it is now, the whole clouds object must leave the screen on the right before it reappears on the left.

    It'd be very cool if we'd have this as an added feature - as soon as the pixels leave the screen on the right, they reappear on the left side.