The thing I like with construct is that I am ABLE to do it alone, since I'm not much of a coder. I would like to have a team, but it's hard to get people involved and stay focused, and real life stuff gets in the way at times. But if i had the money, i wouldn't hesitate to hire talented and skilled staff to work with.

I agree, I don't think I could make my game solo in any other engine.

I think the biggest con when working alone is that... you're alone. It's tough to have good conversations or bounce ideas off people while you're working.

You should just be able to reinstall C2... it takes far less time than someone uploading the template file for you unless you deleted the installer.

It sounds like you saved over the template file. Just make a copy of the file you want to keep and re-install Construct and that should replace it with the correct template file.

Hmm... the browser capping the framerate at 60 FPS makes it hard to tell any difference. Maybe try closing all instances of Chrome and run again from the Start -> Run dialog as:

chrome --disable-gpu-vsync

Then you should get an uncapped framerate which makes for an easier comparison.

That doesn't seem to change anything. It's still capped at 60. In fact, I don't even see the vsync flag anywhere in Chrome (canary/45 or 43). I wish I could give some better benchmarks, but I'm not sure of any way to show more than 60 FPS.

I decided to run a test in three varying areas of my game to get a feel for how it handles. So for three sections of Courier:

Overworld section:

Back to Front:

~11,890 Objects, 60FPS, 70-85% CPU load depending on what I'm doing

Front to Back:

~11,800 Objects, 45-55FPS, 90-96% CPU load depending on what I'm doing

Effects range from low to medium-high depending on location, many objects but not always a lot moving, medium characters in one area.

Small Town Section:

Back to Front:

~1,335 Objects, 60FPS, 25-27% CPU load

Front to Back:

~1,335 Objects: 60 FPS, 30% CPU load

Effects-light, little movement, medium amount of characters

Dungeon with a lot of water and effects:

Back to Front:

~1850 Objects, 60 FPS, 68-75% CPU load

Front to Back:

~1850 Objects, 60 FPS, 70-80% CPU load

Effects-heavy, lots of moving objects, low amount of characters

Core i7 4770 3.4 GHz, 16 GB ram, GeForce GT 640 4GB

My game is typically composed of a lot of overlapping objects, so I would think it would be good candidate for Front to Back. I do have effects in some locations which may be negating gains. I also have layout-wide HSL and Exposure shaders for color correction, so that may be a problem with it too. I do get some rendering differences between them, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

One thing to do instead of constantly creating and destroying objects (though this takes more work) is to just move them. IE, recycle the objects that are already present. So have an ever-constant pool of objects to use and then just move them to a start location instead of creating a new one and destroying it later. Believe it or not, but this runs better on a lot of hardware by quite a bit.

I second that you should look into Spriter. I'm making my game solo as well and Spriter has been the best way for me to have a large quantity of unique characters in the game.

I'm not at my computer, but this should get you where you need to be. The loading bar goes from 0 to 1.0, so you can use interpolation to make it move smoothly between the values.

So something like

Object set width to lerp(progress, progress*maxWidth, 2*DT)

Where max width is however wide your progress bar will be at completion. Adjusting the 2 will change how quickly the bar moves. I don't remember the value construct uses for loading progress, but substitute that with "progress".

I suppose I'll show a new shot for #screenshotsaturday of Courier! Here's a waterfall area I've been working on.

I thought it was entirely CPU-dependent and had very little to do with hdd speed. I believe disabling audio pre-loading may make a difference if you have a lot of audio in the game yet.

I remember you working on this before, but holy cow this is impressive! Aside from a few parallax values being different from the original game, this is absolutely stunning work!

I've only previewed my game at our local public showcase of indie developers. I got about 2 hours of watching different people play Courier (and there was a line!). The feedback and communication was really valuable to me, but it obviously wasn't a big press thing.