Valerien's Forum Posts

  • Thanks Tekniko! It's based on Flappy Bird's principle, and even on an existing app that uses clean vector graphics and spikes that appear from the walls. But we tried to offer a different experience with the game's theme. And hopefully, with can later build on this project to design more elaborate gameplay mechanics !

  • In Fly Trap, you have to fly from wall to wall avoiding nasty insect-eating plants! Don't get eaten!

    Play the game!

    I recently teamed up with Sam Whillance, the creator of the JCHTML5 engine for Game Maker. Together, we made a short html5 game for both mobiles and desktop: Fly Trap. Sam took care of the design, development and sound design, while I worked on the visuals.

    If you are a publisher, and you’d like to make an offer for any type of license, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us!

    Credits

    The game was created with the JCHTML5 framework for GameMaker: Studio. The tweening was made thanks to 8BitWarriors’ Tween GMS engine, which was extremely helpful!

    You can find both Sam and I on twitter: SamWhillance and NathanLovatoArt

    Comments are greatly appreciated! May they be good or bad .

    Cheers, Nathan

  • Hi everyone. I'm back with a little update!

    I am currently working on the art for the game. It will feature sumo wrestlers, most likely in an open environment. It's been quite interesting to learn about this sport, as it produces generally very short, intense encounters. I do like the way the rikishi (the fighters) dance and throw salt before a fight to scare spirits away. I have a hard time staying focused on personal work since a few days, but the animated character will be ready by the end of the week!

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  • Derqs and TheBen : on desktop it won't make much of a difference, most of the time. Just as long as you know your basics (don't use too many large pictures etc.). On mobile phones though, even with optimized code, if you simply have to check the distance between the player and an AI to toggle it active, you will lose precious FPS as levels grow. It is particularly true for weaker phones.

    Apart from that specific case, it's all a matter of game design. I'd rather design the pace of the character, its feel and speed, and make this aspect of the game solid. This will most likely force you into choosing a specific approach. So don't worry too much about the technical side if you're making a desktop game!

    Good luck,

    Nathan

  • Phew, the figure has gone from 1 to 1.5 million in a short period of time, hasn't it? But considering how mature the tool is becoming, you guys deserve that! Keep it up, Scirra !

  • eli0s : it's not what I meant to say. Construct is marketed as a product for people with no experience in programming. "Create games. Effortlessly." This message is what scirra picked as their main selling point. This doesn't mean Construct is only worth the leap for that. Nor that you can't use it if you're not a beginner or anything. But it does attract a lot of people who are rookies in game creation.

  • C2 has its limits, that's true. To me, it is mostly a great prototyping tool, a software that provides a solid workflow when developing small games. But clearly, it would be nice to be able to share and rely a bit more on third-party creations (solid templates, maintained plugins with support...). I'm looking forward to seeing the official marketplace grow actually, it may bring some of that.

    I second you, Aphrodite, the way the whole C2 experience is built, but also the market it targets (people with little programming experience) influences the way third-party products may be perceived.

    By the way, the Rayman team, Ubisoft Montpellier, uses an in-house tech from Ubisoft called the Ubi-Art framework. A few ubisoft studios are working on extremely polished 2d games, and they have pretty big teams, so it makes sense for them to use an in-house piece of tech.

  • This one looks really solid, with those gameboy style graphics. I dig it!

  • Thanks a lot for your interest, both Wisdoms and Giganten !

    I'd love to support multiplayer, and it would actually be simpler to develop a compelling little multiplayer system rather than a vs AI. But I'm not sure I can get an active pool of player with such a basic system. And well, I picked this project mostly to get a sense of how time consuming real time AI programming is actually. And well, I think I'll go back to turn based stuff afterwards !

    Thanks for the bug report too. I'm aware of it (it happens quite often!), but as the game is playable, I wanted to do a release and get refreshed away from AI.

  • Happy birthday Ashley! Jase00 : a birthday meetup with a cog cake

  • Dash Rumble v 0.2 is now up!

    Click to play - v 0.2

    I wrote a devlog about the game design. It also covers AI design principles.

    You can find it there: Dash Rumble - Devlog #1: designing the game and the AI. I hope that you will find it insightful!

    See you soon for a new update!

    Nathan.

  • Excal : There is a profitable market of html5 browser games actually. Although small, it is growing and should slowly replace the flash one. It is not a market where you can create anything you'd like though. Anyway, I made a decent part of my income this year with html5 games, without investing much time and effort.

    However, quite clearly: wrapped games tend to perform poorly. When you compare it to the crazy performances of Unity or some framework like cocos, the difference is astonishing! Not only that, but with a tool like unity in particular, you do get a lot of flexibility as far as your possibilities are concerned.

  • lilvee1989 : Construct does have better performances overall as far as the html5 export is concerned. Now in terms of the features they both offer, they are relatively close to one another. You can program complex game systems with both, with relative ease. Construct 2 is geared a bit more towards beginners in game creation than Game maker too. If you have little experience in development, I'd recommend giving C2 a try.

  • Publishers don't mind games made with construct 2, but you do have to respect a certain set of guidelines. The developer has to offer a game that runs smoothly, that is above a certain quality threshold (close to licensed flash games nowadays), and that offers a good user experience over many devices. Basically as a dev, you just have to provide the publisher with a solid finished product, served on a plate, and they won't even check whether it has been made with c2 or not.

    We've successfully sold quite a few exclusive and non-exclusive licenses for c2 games with my teammate.

  • TheWyrm and — : the only thing to keep in mind is that you might get visual artifacts on neighbor sprites. There is now an option (I believe it's still rated "experimental") to fix the spacing of tilemap components at runtime. But with regular, hand placed sprites, you might get visuals seams in some places. I invite you to test it out before building up some gameplay based on that (it depends on the way you decide to make your art).

    Good luck!

    Nathan