if it's free, i don't care at all. if it costs money, i'll rent it if it's too short.

Say the game lasts an hour if you know exactly how to beat it and costs 4.99 EUR.

And you can't rent it.

Would you buy it if it's a cool game? Would you pay 5 EUR for a cool experience?

One thing I'd love to see in the future are simpler, episodic games that really focus on story and character development - and to sell each episode for something cheap, like 5 bucks. I think that'd be a win / win.

You'd get to play a short, but great game for a small amount of cash and if you liked it and want to know how the story develops further / develop your character further, you get the new episode for another 5 quid.

Would that business model be attractive to anyone here?

Who knows what could be done with it.

Also, remember that we've got 3d software now and that we could create those characters in 3d (and use flat shaded pixel art as textures) and just render out the different perspectives for each animation type.

This is not as tough anymore as it used to be when we really needed to paint each pixel from scratch. Creating 2d with the help of 3d is a very viable option these days, especially for stuff like this.

I used to fucking hate the fact that in 2d games my character never changed in appearance when I equipped a new set of armor or weapon. It just wasn't feasible back then to create dozens of animation phases for each and every set of equipment. But that sorta stuff could be done pretty easily with todays tech - batch setup your scene with the equipment and batch render it out over night.

This is probably a pretty good example why most JRPGs Storylines suck:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... ta-Stories

I used to love this stuff, the 16 and 32bit Square Games were still really good. Story-wise, Final Fantasy Tactics probably kicked the ball out of the park in that era. But around the late 90s, Square sort of forgot how to tell stories and how to create interesting characters.

I sooooo used to love Squaresoft back then for what they were trying to do with games when there were still so many technical limitations around - but now, as most of the technical limitations are gone, they dropped the ball on what made them great back then. There's a lesson to be learned here.

From what I've heard on yesterdays chat, .99 will be a pretty fucking awesome update, so I'm pretty sure it'll be worth the wait. New control System, Z depth, a completely new organizational layer in the project bar - sweetness.

That's one of the things I've been thinking about so much lately - I fucking hate the idea that you as a player run around and you've got a few 'obstacles' in your way that always follow absolutely the same pattern, just waiting for you to interact with them (so that they can go back following the same pattern again) or kill them.

I mean, Mario Bros is like over 20 years old now and our enemies still aren't that much smarter. Seriously, I've just played Fable 2 and that games logic is so broken (I even think that Fable 1 was better in that regard, but my memory could fool me here), it's not even funny. All the bandits are just stupid fuckers just waiting for you to kill them, so you get EXP. It's like junk food, it's an easy thing to do and you get some pleasure killing stupid enemies, but it SO kills the atmosphere and the believability. You're being put into a world that artists worked on for years and put in countless hours to make it look believable and then they fill it up with stupid fucking enemies that are just so fucking stupid that instead of killing them you might just want to pity them.

In that regard, I loved what Eric Chahi was doing with his games like Another World - The enemies never felt like they're just fucking stupid, he probably didn't have simple loops and formulas for characters, but designed every one of them based on the scenario. Of course it's a bit unfair to compare those two, cause Another World is a perfect example of a totally linear game, but come on.

Link is dead?

Classic!

Thanks guys, all that advice really helped. I think I have a good idea now how I can get all of this to work.

One thing I'm wondering is: Is there a way to just temporarily switch to another layout to tell the story further? Say, I'm on layout 2 and a certain event happens - Now I want to put in a cutscene and only temporarily switch to layout 11.

Layout 11 has a 'Start of Layout - Play Timeline' event assigned to it, so it'd automatically start playing as I temporarily switch to it. And when the timeline is over, I'd want to switch back to the exact same position I've been before - isn't that somehow possible?

Switching temporarily to another scene is vital in terms of cinematography to give the player more background in terms of story or tell him something about a character - This would be my Nr. 1 feature request if there's not any workaround in there to achieve this.

Most of the other framework is already done - creating detailed cutscenes is one of the last big things I still have to tackle.

Deadeye: I loved the TCR Intro / Cutscenes. I know it's a bit much to ask, but would you share the cap with us? Even if the timeline object would make things a little easier now, I'd love to see how you tackled the problem and how convoluted it got.

Yep, that did the trick! Thank god, already thought that's a bigger bug.

Here's the ini:

http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/const ... struct.ini

Okay, haven't figured out what's causing this and how to get rid of it:

Yesterday I just created a cutscene with the timeline object. At one time, I added a couple of new sprites and suddenly, boom, my picture editor was white. I move the mouse cursor into the picture editor... crash.

I restart Construct, do the same thing again - picture editor is white again, move the cursor into it = crash.

Happens every time now, so that bug basically renders Construct useless. Here's a screenie of the error message + the white picture editor:

http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/const ... ash_00.jpg

The frigging picture editor is probably what casued 99% of my crashes in Construct and now this, meh.

Any help would be appreciated

Tried to uninstall and reinstall to a different directory - didn't help, same bug / crash.

Another thumbs up. This would be great to have.

Simple menu object.

turn off computer action

this would be a great April fools action. All it will do is turn off the computer when you activate it. haha. We could put this into all of our games and release emergency patches that would turn off their computer after they launch the game. They would probably never play any of our games again but hey it would be funny wouldn't it?

Worst. Request. Ever.

Hey, I know another funny one: While the game is playing, why don't we trigger a format C:/ action if the system date is April 1st? That'd be SOOOO funny!

"Dave, I finally finished that fucking game, but now all the work we've done in the last 3 months has been deleted! I know, it sucks, but it was worth it!"