The "3 in 1 game" is a great tutorial, that shows a variety of very usable design and implementation tricks. As beginner, however, I could not make sense of it and therefore I decided to write a documentation on it in the way I understand it. I hope this will facilitate others appreciate the great contribution that Lordshiva1948 did, and also help them writing their own games.
Let's start with the design, this can be done at best on a piece of paper (at least at the beginning to understand the architecture):
Title
The Game starts with the Title screen
it consists of
1) a Background of a sky with some white clouds,
2) the Text with the name of the game,
3) a nice yellow Guide
4) the Shapes button
5) the Number button
6) the Alphabet button
These are implemented in Construct 2 using the Layout called Title
.
This is only the starting screen and the purpose of this screen is then to let the player decide if wants to play with the Shapes or with the Numbers or with the Alphabet minigames. Simple ! It is a kind of Navigation or Table of contents - by using the analogy with a book.
The Title Layout is implemented using three different Layers:
. Each Layer takes care of grouping specific items:
The Background layer has a Sprite with the image of the sky and three Text objects with the names of the minigames. It is locked since should not be changed during the games.
The Button layer has the Text with the name of the game, and then three Sprites one for each of the three minigames.
Finally the Guide layer has simply a Sprite with the yellow background.
If one would at this point play the game, one will not have anything specially going on: for this reasons we need the Event Sheet.
Each layer might have its own Event sheet, or this can also be used in different layers: this is something that can be easily controlled in the Layout Properties panel (usually on the left of the Construct 2 integrated development environment. Let's now look at its detailed content:
Remember: the events are numbered and the engine process them precisely in the order specified, from the smallest number (1, the top of the Sheet) to the largest one (7 in this case, the last one).
1. System start:
scroll the game to the position where the yellow guide starts, and then make the yellow object invisible, this is recommended and thoroughly explained elsewhere, furthermore a music is played.
2. If the Shape button is touched
play the sound squash once, then stop the music and launch the Shapes Layer.
3. If the Numbers button is touched
play the sound squash once, then stop the music and launch the Numbers Layer.
4. If the Alphabet button is touched
play the sound squash once, then stop the music and launch the Alphabet Layer.
The other events in this sheet are related with an additional minigame that is in the title page and I let you discover it by yourself.
Conclusions
We have learned many things from this first Layout:
- split each "scene" into an own Layout
- each Layout has its own Event Sheet
- go form one Layout to another using the Action System GoTo
- how to play sounds
- ??