I managed to "fix" (read: "get around") this by just hard-coding transitions with "Go to layout" instead of "Next layout". If anyone else is having the same problem, I'd recommend this approach. Note that this was after closing and reopening three times to make the first layout actually first.

You have no idea how good it is that this bug has a workaround. I would have been utterly screwed without it.

Okay, first of all, let me say that I hope that this makes sense. I took some screenshots in the hope that that would help.

Anyway, I think that "next layout" is completely broken, but I'm not entirely sure if this is a bug or just me being dumb about something.

First, we have this:

<img src="http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i240/eieidan/firstscreen.png">

This setup is (fairly obviously) the order in which the layouts are supposed to be played. Upon running the program, the opening cutscene plays as expected, and then the next two events are completely given a pass in favor of Stage One. Okay, that's weird. So I closed the program and reopened it.

<img src="http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i240/eieidan/secondscreen.png">

Sure enough, the events have rearranged themselves to reflect the order in which they played before. Okay, it's just a refresh glitch maybe. I rearranged the layouts into their right order and hit play. The stage one screen pops up, then the title screen, then the cutscene. Okay, let's try restarting Construct again.

<img src="http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i240/eieidan/thirdscreen.png">

So it's not just a refresh glitch. It's seemingly rearranging the entire layout set every time under its own set of mysterious rules.

My game is done with the exception of weaving stages together. If this is a bug, it's a major one, and I need to know how to get around it soon. I have not yet tried using pure "go to layout" with a string literal, but I will assume that it works for the sake of my sanity.

Any information is appreciated.

Edit: Wrong image codes. Whoops.

Okay, here's the backstory.

When I started out, I just used green boxes of various widths as placeholder platforms. These, obviously, could just be a single object stretched to various widths, as the sprite was just a green box.

Fast forward to now, when I have unique sprites for each different-width platform. Stretching the sprites for one just looks terrible, so I need several different objects. I used Paste Clone on the basic platform several times, and now have several platforms which should be allowed to take different sprites and be placed where the old stretched ugly ones were.

The problem is this: Whenever I change the sprite on one platform, it changes the sprite on every object that was cloned from the original platform, that is to say, every platform. So I cannot in fact have unique sprites with this approach at all. Considering this, I was just wondering what the exact purpose of Paste Clone even is, if it does not differ in any noticeable way from straight Paste.

I'm aware that, in the time it took to type this post, I could have just made seven new objects, made them solid, and given them a width and height. The problem isn't really just here, because this just seems like a weird design issue, unless there's something I'm not understanding. It'd be great to be able to have objects that have different sprites and the exact same behavior. I would hate to hard-code every single enemy in an RPG.