During the last half of the spring term my class at university was given the task to create a game using Construct. We were given 9 weeks and between 1-3 programmers per project.

The general experience is that Construct is entirely too filled with bugs to ever be useful in its current state. We spent more time finding work-arounds and tracking down bugs than we did actually getting any work done on our games. The bugs were so numerous that it was good we were working as a class... so most bugs only had to be tracked down once. After one group figured out a bug, the other groups could save time. Python is not as well integrated as it should be, subevents are ok... as long as you don't want to specify anything with OR or ELSE... then it has a tendency to not work.

Many features seem to have been just tossed in without much testing. Or features are half-added and half-completed. I'm well-aware that this is open source and such, but Construct is still not at the point where it is useable as anything except the roughest of game prototypes. Or as an exercise in patience and using unstable software. It does inspire creativity and problem solving though.

We were also unable to merge our files. This made groupwork very interesting. Most games today are mostly made in groups or teams. Not by individuals in their basements. As we are studying computer game programming, it is vitally important that we learn to work in groups. This meant that people had to work in separate cap files, then REDO everything in the main cap file once things were working correctly, and hope that nothing would cause bugs or conflicts. The other option was to have only one main cap file and have the other people in the group frantically looking after bugs and once a bug is found, try to figure out how to fix it without breaking anything else. The end result, at least for my group, was basically having a full-time bug finder-fixer.

Construct (Or "Scirra Destruct... click and crash" as we were calling it by the end of the project) was chosen over other possible programs for this course because it was open source. From comments the teachers have mentioned, open source is not terribly useful when the libraries required to compile and hence fix some of the many many bugs, are not open source. As with most free software, filled with bugs was expected... but not being able to fix them was just silly.

The REALLY ugly ribbon display was also very annoying. If working on a laptop or computer with a small screen, you quickly find that you have no space left to actually build your game. The menu bars which were almost required to be up all the time due to the information, also took up a ton of space on the screen. The layout works well... IF you have a large monitor. Otherwise, rather silly!

Construct was not all bad, as mentioned previously, it is a good learning tool. It also has possibilities if it is not abandoned and if many of the bugs are fixed. It might be an idea to stop attempting to add new features and get the current features stabilized first. I'm aware we were using the 'unstable release' but it is not possible to use the stable release when all help, advice, and such only refers to the most recent unstable. And the first response to any question is 'be sure you are using the latest unstable!'

Most groups in the class did manage to get games together. I don't think any of the groups have managed to create 100% stable games though. News releases and other information can be found at:

https://projects.gscept.com/projects/mp2010

Each group also has a public folder on their repository... swapping out the # with a number from 1 to 7 will get you there:

http://gscept.com/projects/games/2010/G#/public/

What is the best way to play music and sounds? We've got three different mp3 files that should loop during different parts of the game. These music files should never play at the same time. So they stop and start at various points. We've also got a bunch of wav files that sometimes play at the same time as music and sometimes not.

What is the best way to handle this? Currently we're using play from resource, but we have a few crash causing bugs and there are problems with looping.

If I want to play a wav file when a door opens, no looping, and at the same time as music is playing without interrupting or disturbing the music. What action should I be choosing? Should I have the music loaded in as resource or just file?

If I want music to play across many layouts and loop, what is the best way to do this? I just need to turn it off when I start new music or die. What action should I be choosing? Should I have this loaded as a resource or just a file in the same place as the cap/exe?

It seems that I can't have music under music or sounds and have to have it under files to get it to work properly, am I missing something?

Currently using the latest unstable build.

Mmmm, that's about what we ended up doing. Odd that it is needed though.

Well... after removing pretty much EVERYTHING from this rather annoying cap file... I've still got problems. Trying to add 1 to my global variable damage and remove 18 from the global variable Gold. But it multiplies everything by 3. Earlier I was having lag and it would only remove the requested amount if I moved the mouse quickly away after clicking on the button. But only on the first time, after that it would remove 3x the amount again.

But anyways... here's the cap file. Any solutions or work arounds or pointing out whatever stupid mistake I've made would be way appreciated. I think I've spent a good 5 hours trying to figure out different ways to do this... without any luck. I've even tried at one point writing it in python, with the exact same result.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6493733/MouseCrazy.cap

Thanks again!

Ok... so for all our characters with image points... we delete those, fix the collision masks, then put them back in?

Is this a known bug? Or just one of those 'feature' things? =)

Ok. We found the point in our revisions where the launch explorer stopped working... so here are the two versions. We don't see any differences between them that would cause the image explorer thingie in animations to crash. Any ideas?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6493733/nonworking.cap

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6493733/working.cap

Or am I slowly going insane?

Currently my cap file crashes construct every time we try to 'launch explorer' from the animator window. We've tested the cap file on 3 different computers and it crashes all of them. Is there a work around for changing collision masks that doesn't involve launching the explorer? Or is the only option to create a separate sprite for collisions? Or (please say this is true!) is there a setting I have wrong somewhere that will magically make construct stop crashing?

I swear I used to be able to change collision masks with this cap file!

https://projects.gscept.com/attachments/download/451/SpaceKeyEvents.JPG

It's a huge mess of nested if statements at the moment. It works... but I wonder if there is some sort of easier way to accomplish the same thing? It basically opens doors when switches are thrown in the correct order, or when clues are activated in the right order.

Any ideas? Advice? or just click all the - signs again and hope for the best?

So... right now we've got a player that can swap between layers as much as they feel like it. But we want it so that only the enemies respawn when the player goes back to a previously visited layer. Items that they've picked up (keys, money) don't respawn. But if they haven't picked up that item before... the item should be there.

I know I could do this by making a long list of all the items and put a 'check' if the player has grabbed it in the past and then destroy it on startup if the player has gotten it. But this seems like it would be rather resource intensive, not to mention being a royal pain to implement.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this? Or a better method? I'm all for using other people's experiences and knowledge!

well... after a couple of days of feeling rather stupid, how do the arrays work in construct? I checked over the wiki and didn't really find much information and there were a couple of threads on arrays, but I couldn't get the example files to load. It just kept saying 'unreadable'

Basically I want to have a 5 element, 2 dimensional array... so nothing complicated. I want to sort it, and save it so that next time I start up the program the same array is there. I had this working with a listbox, but I want to see if I can get it to work with an array. Just cause I'm trying to avoid doing what I should be doing today.

I think this is probably excessively easy and I'm just missing something that gives me that 'ah ha!' moment... =P