DevS: We tried it on the chat.

Fullscreen crashes if your screen doesn't support 720p native. You click it, it crashes.

Also, the Windows Buttons don't work in fullscreen. If you happen to have a display that supports 720p native and you go fullscreen, the buttons will be hidden and they only flicker if you mouse-over them.

I'll put that on the tracker in a bit.

That's an awesome little game, but it's a bit too hard for me. Here's me playtesting your game for 5 minutes:

http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/gotit_FUCK!.avi

(Including a little "FUCK YOU, I DID IT!" dance followed by "CRAP, YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME!" frustration)

Still, there are TONS of people out there who fucking love hard games, so I wouldn't say that's a fault of the game if it was intended to be fucking hard and only appeal to those that really wanna be challenged to shit by their games.

MegaMan 9 found a lot of fans too, so no biggie.

This:

[quote:2l0ckgkt]However the final method is something fans have been wanting for a very long time. AGM allows the user to output their game into the XNA Game Studio which for those of you who don't know its the program that you can use to create XBox 360 games!

is a BIG win. I hope Construct will support that too later on, cause that'd be huge. A lot of the 2d games people are gonna make will just make more sense being played on a console where you can naturally assume that a player has a controller in his hand and plays it on an LCD Screen.

Can you guys do me a favor and try this one out?

http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/corrupted_01.rar

I've gotta find out whether I'm the only one who has trouble with full-screen, if it's Windows 7 or just monitors that don't support 720p natively. The funny thing is that full-screen works if I plug my LCD TV in, but for my standard PC monitor it'll try to switch to full-screen and crash. The funny thing is: I just bought World of Goo over Steam and if I try to start it, it starts out in full-screen which also results in a crash.

20mb again. Still gotta optimize it and do the music stuff externally. Shvillers and Ashleys new alphatesting thingy should really help for this project

This is still the same prototype, for the most part. I just added a debug screen to test some more framework stuff, so you can now set it to full-screen and set the moBlur on and off for yourself.

The actual game has gone through such huge changes both on paper and in terms of concepts that I'll just rebuild this whole thing now, shouldn't take too long.

Controls: Esc to exit, arrow keys to run around, up to talk to boxes, enter to pause, z to jump.

29) From an organizational point of view, I read that the objects folders are gonna be pretty helpful.

Can't we get the same thing for the project palette? So, instead of having a layout sheet and an event sheet and both just separated in the list to the right (right now, the only way to know which layout belongs to which event sheet is by giving both sheets similar names), we'd create a 'level' sheet and inside of that level sheet we'd find the layout and the event sheet. Then, we could manage all the level sheets that should be together in folders.

The hierarchy would still be the same, so we'd go from folders to level sheets to the layouts sheets that are then influenced by the event sheets.

It'd just give us 2 more layers of organization - I think that'd make way more sense.

Simple!

<img src="http://blog.tonilovesred.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/shera.jpg">

> Yes, that's the better method for visible objects (like players), just copy/paste them over. It won't create a new Sprite, just a new instance.

>

Oh okay. Though I just did that and some things seem to be acting strangely. The player sprite is moving thrice as fast but I'm still using the same event sheets...

Well, thanks for the help!

I had that before. Pretty sure your player sprite isn't on the right layer then.

So what happens right now is that the whole game is loaded into the vram at start, right? Couldn't we just create triggers that'd tell the engine to start streaming what we'd need? Like, it's not too hard to imagine that if you're on layout 2 and got 10 layouts, you probably won't be able to go to more than 3 layouts next. You either go to layout 1, layout 3 or you go to the menu. We could set triggers for that. If player is on layout 2, start streaming layout 2 and 3.

Or: If player overlaps with 'StreamObject', start streaming layout 3.

We could have the menu screen as a global layout always in the ram.

In the case of that not being enough, we could still simply create a "Now Loading" layout that the engine automatically temporarily jumps to when changing layouts.

Again, I'm pretty sure I'm really oversimplifying it, but maybe some input from how a lowly artist sees it will help

Alright, I've even been thinking about creating a whole platform for this and will probably still do it, thanks to Construct making it so easy to test and prototype ideas, but I've been thinking about this a lot.

Now, I'm not even looking for the golden answer right now, I just wanna throw this into the room and see what'll happen.

Some of you might have seen what I've been dabbling with. I'm a character artist and I worked in the industry for a while, but I never got the chance to do more than just a component of a game or a cinematic - cause I can't program and because todays games are so far away from being one-man productions. And I'm the type of person who'll probably never learn a programming language, that's just too technical and boring for me to grasp. If I don't 'see' things as I create them, I get bored. So thanks to the Construct team for putting this out - Construct is reasonably simple to put me into the directors position without having to have a lot of financial backup nor having to have a reasonably sized team in the background.

So, the thing I've been working on is a sidescroller with a big focus on story. The idea is that I'm gonna explore more cinematic game experiences - Like, a lot of the industries top games in the recent years have been created by developers that were highly inspired by Eric Chahis 'Another World' (http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/) - if you've never tried it, go ahead and give it a try, it's still worth it. Hideo Kojima (Konami) and Fumito Ueda (Team Ico) have both publicly stated that their games were heavily influenced by Another World. And there's a reason for that.

The game was great. It was the first time that a game really felt dynamic (even though it wasn't) and your actions were nicely paced and happened because of a reason. You didn't just jump on monsters heads to blop them away, you had this cinematic gameplay that just felt completely different than anything else ever done before. If you killed an enemy, it felt a lot more 'real' than killing a Goomba in Super Mario.

There was just one problem with Another World and the sequels and clones that followed: The game was the most linear thing ever. It was meticulously planned out from A to Z. If you didn't follow what Eric had in mind while creating the game, you'd die. And you'd die a LOT. Like, at least 500 times until you complete the game and I'm not even exaggerating here.

And of course that's frustrating. Also, I think that sorta gameplay worked in the past, cause we used to have more time in the past. There was no internet, we had fewer opportunities and interestingly enough some other games and genres used to work and sold a lot of copies - namely games where you had to try out a hell of a lot in order to get through it. I don't think that a game like Another World, where the premise is to make mistakes and die, then learn from it so often til you finish the game would work in today's world. I think it'd get horrible reviews because of it. Nobody wants to invest so much time for something so trivial. Such frustration - by todays standards - is unbearable. Honest to god: If you'd buy another world for 10 bucks at an Online Store like Steam or Xbox Live Arcade and then you'd die 20 times in 10 minutes and still don't know the right solution: Would you keep playing it?

I know I would 'shelf' it and probably never look at it again. Even if the 10 minutes were pretty good, I'd probably think my time is more valuable than that.

I also think that's why Point and Click Adventures completely died out. They were good, well produced, really well written and they were funny - but solving sometimes really ill-perceived puzzles just wasn't a lot of fun. It was a lot of work to get to the short moments of fun. And the biggest mistake you could make is to make your game feel like it's work.

Now, to give this thread some meaning, I'll just ask you guys: How would you solve that problem? How do you tell a good story in an interactive experience (read: a game) that's not completely linear so that you'll die a gazillion deaths until you find out the one right way to go?

Todays games aren't built that way. They're mostly built up like Fast Food. Cause we don't have the time anymore and we want to be rewarded quickly. Experience systems, I can level up my characters, developers draw the audience into the game - mostly not because they want to tell them a great story that will probably inspire them or that they can learn from - but because they appeal to their, let's say, 'raw instincts'. I think that's also the reason why games generally aren't considered to be 'art' yet - cause people don't express themselves in them.

So, how do we mix it? How do we solve the puzzle? What games would you like to see going forward? Are you happy with the games that are being produced right now? Do you even care about titles like Resident Evil 5? Gears of War 2? God of War 3? Halo 3? Doom 4?

From a story and an emotional point of view, I'm certain that the 'cheap tricks' that have been used in games so far (like letting Aerith die in Final Fantasy VII) are fairly amateurish (in the sense that a typical bullshit novel probably has more death packed into its first 20 pages), but it doesn't seem like bigger games are interested in finding a solution (see Gears of Wars 'emotional moment') - or it's too risky to bet your game on something that could arouse your fan-base (that in turn finances your development), so what we see happening is a lot of bloat right now. Cause bloat is safe.

How could this problem be solved?

Can't that somehow be streamed? I mean, always load the current layout and always already start streaming the previous and the next layout into the vram - and kick out everything else.

I'm sure I'm uber-simplifying it, but isn't that how it's usually being done?

It'll be cool to see how the VRam stuff will work. Currently, I imagine it like a container, you set the size of the container (vram of your target audience) and just shuffle stuff in and out of there and setup 'load' times accordingly.

Object Folders and - probably even more important - a better way to organize and handle the layouts and layout event sheets would really help for bigger projects. Like, why not put parenting in there? Every layout comes with an event sheet, so you could immediately organize it that way, like:

"Oh, I wanna find my layout 1 event sheet... where is it... ah, yeah, I just press the 'plus' sign next to layout 1 and - ah, there it is!"

If we could do parenting and also have folders in there, it'd really help keeping larger scale projects organized and readable - especially also important if more than one person is working on the project.

28) Right now, we can't order Effects. So, say I want a black and white effect on top and then a soften effect. If I first applied the soften, I don't really see a way of how to tell Construct that the Black and White should happen first - then soften.