Haha I know the feeling Hasuak. Been thinking about the same thing on and off for over a year now and have only come to the conclusion that it's probably best to try a minimalistic approach to both the gameplay and the story. Not only will that make it more doable in terms of scope, but I think the two will be able to play along more nicely if theyre not fighting for dominance.

Like Arima suggested, it may be wise to rework the story to see if it can fit with different kinds of gameplay better. Maybe have the story told in a subtle way throughout the game, where the player would have to fill in a lot of the blanks. Have you ever played Out of this World? It's a pretty good examples of this.

I personally also feel that combat heavy gameplay kind of distracts me from story... I think adventure type games are better for immersing players but the challenge there is to make it feel like you're doing something even when you're stuck, else it can get boring fast. Most people these days don't seem to have much patience for obscure, often nonsensical puzzles and such.

Wow that's a really cool idea!

Wow these are awesome! Very impressive!

I have a question about reporting bugs.

I've gotten quite a few seemingly random crashes in the past and when I run in debug mode it only says that the crash was successfully "intercepted" and that I should report it to the construct devs. I find these crashes very hard to narrow down and reproduce, so not sure how I would even go about describing them.

Is there anything we can do in cases like this? When construct intercepts a crash does it dump an error log anywhere that we could maybe upload?

I did a quick run through of the "post-your-screenshots" thread and it seemed like most people here are using a 4:3 aspect ratio. I personally prefer to do vids at 1280x720 but don't really care either way, majority should dictate.

Also here's another site with really cheap royalty free music: http://audiojungle.net/page/top_sellers

The final music should probably be decided on once all the clips have been chosen. If the majority of them are bubbly rainbow coloured sidescrollers then slapping on a serious sounding classical track may not be the most fitting. I do agree though that none of the crap you hear on the radio should be used.

Totally agree... these days I can hardly get excited about any game that comes out, but I can't wait to play Limbo. It's dripping with atmosphere... the animation is so smooth and flawless, everything connects perfectly, the character and environments blend together seemlessly. Love it.

The link doesn't seem to work for me.

Not sure what specifically you're trying to do but can't you do that kind of thing with functions? You would just have to pass in the player ID or something whenever you call the function.

You can store 3 masks in the RGB channels of a sprite and tint these areas independently. This method allows for gradients and semi transparent tinting as well, but this is the most basic implementation so any untinted areas will be black (which works fine for your citizens Namelezz).

<img src="http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y8/soggyclog/tint_mask.jpg">

I put together a basic shader and sample CAP file (edit:forgot to include the .FX file before, but should be there now)

http://www.filedropper.com/colourtinting2

Right now the shader takes independent RGB values for all three masks so thats 9 numbers. I don't know if there's a more elegant way to have just 3 colour pickers or something.

This shader can also be made much more useful if instead of storing the transparency in the alpha channel you store a 4th mask, and then have a seperate sprite beneath the tinting sprite to provide the monochrome detail and blend with an overlay mode. The down side to that would be that you need two sprites per character. But yeay, for this kind of pixel art stuff that's not really necessary.

Thanks for the reply.

I've found that containers work great when you have one group of objects associated with one character. The problem I have now is that I have multiple characters and multiple groups of objects that I want to mix-and-match in different conbinations, so containers don't work. Unless I'm missing something about how they work.

Based on my forum searches as well as on my own experience, when you use System: Create Object on a family it picks a random member. Is there a way to tell construct to spawn each member of a family in an elegant way?

In case it helps, here's what I'm trying to do:

I have different groups of sprites that each represent various segments of characters. At runtime I want to spawn and attach these groups of sprites to npc characters and even switch between them to create combinations.

So far the cleanest way seems to be with families since I can do the attaching of all members in a single action, but spawning them is a different matter. If anyone has a smarter way I'd appreciate the help

Yeah its a sweet engine for sure... Their material editor is simply awesome.

Yeah, once you are making more than $5000 profit they'll start taking a good chunk of it. Still really good considering what they give you.