Going further
The tips exposed in this article are only basic techniques to improve your programming speed. They are a few steps towards high productivity. As an uncluttered coding experience keeps your brain busy, those tricks might also help you to better focus on your work.
However, there is a lot to learn beyond that! Productivity is mainly a matter of getting the most out of the tools at your disposal. Construct 2 possesses many other powerful features: global layers, families, saving and loading data as JSON, etc.
Efficiency comes with a lot of practice, a lot of mistakes and a lot of time spent solving workflow issues. Productive designers simply question their design choices and workflow. They do so often, and come up with a wide range of solutions. If you want to become a productive designer, you need to find ways to avoid repeating tasks.
You may want to use easy to edit external data, re-use functions from project to project, read the C2 manual in depth and share your choices and experience with other users online. I would like to stress that point out: share your techniques and workflow with others. Not only you’re unlikely to see your solutions used that much (as people tend to stick with their established workflow), but chances are you could be more efficient! I have learned a lot myself, from both more and less experienced people. Others lead us to solve problems we wouldn’t consider by ourselves alone – to great effect.
I’ll try to share some more information about how to be productive as a game designer in future articles. In the meantime, I’m leaving you with 2 articles to look at:
1. StackExchange: What is the single most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?
2. How I teach Game Design (the Iterative process/workflow)
Last words – coming next
Thank you for supporting my construct 2 tutorials. If you like them, please share them with your friends! You can also reach me on twitter and on facebook ! You can find more tutorials on my website as well. Last but not least, you can send me tutorial requests via private messages or on my forum thread.
Next week, I won’t release a new tutorial. Instead, I want to release my first free game assets template! A set of polished cartoon UI sprites for your mobile games. So stay tuned!