Okay. I guess I've been lurking long enough and ought to introduce myself. My name is Kim, and I live in the US. I'm old enough to have used punch cards (but just once) which may make me old enough to be your mother. Professionally I've been a developer, project manager, technical writer, QA manager, marketing director and jack-of-all-trades. I've worked in both commercial software development and pharmaceutical equipment manufacturing fields. I have too many interests to list, and am thus not really good at any of them. I've wanted to learn to develop games for a long time, and decided to finally just do it. Hopefully Construct 2 will provide the means to do so.

It depends a lot on what kind of game you are making, or rather, what kind of art you need.

But regardless, don't get bogged down by the art. If your game is fun to play with "programmer art" (aka "placeholder art") you can then spend time on the graphics -- either doing it yourself, buying pre-made art, hiring someone to do it or getting volunteers who want to be involved with your project (which is a lot easier to do when you have a finished except for the art project.)

If you spend a lot of time on graphics before you have a game that is fun to play, you may totally waste that time because you may discard the game. (Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way. Several times.)

Okay, I've said my piece. Now here are some excellent resources for learning to make 2D game art.

Chris Hildenbrand's 2D Game Art For Programmers Tutorials on Gamasutra

AWESOME! Uses free tools and assumes you know how to do basic things, like make circles and gradients. Not step by step, but enough if you have any idea of how to use the tools. Concepts applicable to Illustrator/Photoshop too. Don't miss the link to part 2!

Chris Hildenbrand's 2D Game Art For Programmer's Blogspot

EVEN MORE AWESOME! Continues on where the original Gamasutra tutorials left off. In fact, if you go back to the earliest posts, you'll find the Gamasutra tutorials. Chris also has some assets for sale here--eg., his Block Buddy packs of animated characters. "Life is too short to make bad art."

Creating 3D Sprites and Using Them In Construct 2

Short tutorial by Construct 2 user Martin on using Google Sketchup to make buildings for game scenes. If you like this approach, there are tons of resources out there for how to use Sketchup.

(Alternatively, you can use other 3D tools like Daz Studio and Bryce, which are currently available for FREE at daz3d.com to render 3D models into royalty free 2D game art. Lots of tutorials for using them, too. Lots of models for purchase at daz, renderosity.com, etc.)

insertcode.co.uk 2D Game Art Tutorials

This is a new blog (started at the end of January.) So far there are eight tutorials on using illustrator and photoshop to create game art.

Igor Sinkovec's Walking and Running Animation Tutorials

Short lesson on animation theory.

That's all for now. As I remember or come across others, I'll post. Hope it helps!

EDIT: As promised, I'm adding more tutorials as I find them. Just one to start, but there will be more, I promise.

More Tutorials

==============

Pixel Art Tutorials

These are by Scirra community member Noise. So far there are 8 or so, but it looks like a great series on pixel art. I found the lessons on color, contrast and light very helpful.

These are some links I've saved off for music and sound resources. Other than incompetech.com, I have no personal experience with them, but they are a starting point. Comments are what they say about themselves [unless in brackets.]

Has anyone else used any of these? Does anyone have any others?

incompetech.com

Royalty free music. [free with attribution; purchase if you don't want to attribute..]

partnersinrhyme.com

"Royalty Free Music and Sound Effects

plus free music loops, free sound effects, free midi files and free audio software."

soundsnap.com

"140,000 sound effects and loops. Unlimited Downloads for $249/year! [Note: various plans, starting with 5 sounds for $9 up to unlimited for $249 a year.]

Now featuring Premium Sound Effects from the sound designers of:

Batman Begins, Million Dollar Baby, Ali, Happy Feet, Star Trek, The Addams Family, Tron, The Hunt for Red October and more."

"You are Free:

• To remix or transform the sounds in any way

• To copy and transmit the sounds- but not resell them as they are originally downloaded from Soundsnap

• To use the sounds in any music, film, video game, website etc. whether commercial or not, without paying addiotional royalties or other fees beyond the initial membership cost (if any)"

musicloops.com

Royalty free music loops and full length tracks for preview and immediate download. Full resolution stereo WAV files, no cue sheet, no hassles.

soundloopstudio.com

Our collection of background music loops is made especially for use with flash and websites. Royalty Free music loops are also suitable for games, PowerPoint, presentations, video, films, etc. All our music is 100% original, produced in our studio by professional musicians.

soughtaftersounds.com

Soughtafter Sounds provides professional music & sound design to independent game developers, as well as film makers, advertising teams and organisations looking to include an originally composed audio architecture within their development.

[Free commercial music requires that you provide credit, let them use your project name in promoting their music or something like that...?]

Audio Micro

Music loops starting at $4 a track, Sound FX starting at $1 a track. Also free music and SFX.

Shucks. I was afraid the performance bottleneck was the pathfinding. I still really like the pathfinder plugin, but I guess it isn't right for this game.

Thanks for the suggestions, Mercy. I have a version where the ghost switches to a random angle at the intersections. I'll try doctoring it up by implementing your ideas.

This plugin was very easy to get started with. I like it a lot--especially the example with the smooth and stepped movement.

However, when trying to make a pacman clone, I ran into a few problems that are probably due to my ignorance. If I can get the game working reasonably well, I'd like to make an in depth C2 tutorial using it.

pathfinderPMan.capx

1) Cannot get the ghosts to start where I put them (in the "corral" in center of the board.) They keep starting at somewhere around 0,0.

2) Performance was really slow. Is this because there are 4 ghosts using the pathfinding plugin? Or is it because my obstacles are all kinds of weird sizes? (see 3)

3) I wasn't sure what you meant by saying that the obstacles had to follow the grid size we set. Do you mean the sprite dimensions have to be evenly divisible by that size, or do you mean they have to line up with the grid? Because mine don't. The pathfinding seems to work okay, but it does get slow. Is this why?

4) I created my game by modifying your path following example, but there is something in it that causes the objects to quit following the path and go back to the first point in the queue when the iteration is > self.PathFinder.getPathListLength. When I tried to rip it out, the ghosts stopped moving. How can I make them stop where they are until they start the next pathfinding loop? Possibly related, is there a way to limit/unlimit the maximum number of steps allowed in the path?

That's enough for now! Any help would be appreciated.

If it will help you, I have a "pacman" learning exercise that I'm putting on hold for now. It incorporates Kyatric's pathfinding behavior (which actually makes it simpler, rather than more difficult!) Anyway, if you want it, here it is:

PathfinderPman.capx

I took one of the pathfinder examples that shows how to move an object, gutted it and grafted on the pacman stuff. There are performance problems and lots of bugs. The worst is that the enemies just will not start out where they should! But it may help you getting things going.

Well I downloaded it and even decided to buy a few morph packs as well since the genesis model doesn't really start with too many options for changing it's appearance.

If anybody else intends to buy something from the DAZ store make sure you look out for bundles within bundles I purchased 2 morph bundles for what I thought was a good price only to find them being sold together with several other bundles for a even cheaper price then what I paid for them individually!

Daz is really good about returns as long as it is within 30 days of purchase. Just contact support with what happened and how you'd like it fixed, and they'll usually accomodate you. (It is easiest if you take a credit rather than a refund, but they'll do it either way.) So in your case, just say you'd like to return the bundles (for credit or refund) and then buy the cheaper bundle that has both.

Edit: If you are going to buy a lot of stuff, consider joining the Platinum Club, which gets you an extra 30% discount off of most things, and a $6 voucher good for Daz Originals each month.

This is the coolest thing ever, Chris! I just happened to have a cutout fantasy character laying around, so I wired him up and he was floating around in space in no time.

It's actually rather creepy in a way. I spent a lot of time making this guy, yet he was never more than just an electronic paperdoll who would animate the way I made him. But now...

He's alive. <img src="smileys/smiley15.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I'm going to add his other two limbs and then I'm going to watch him thrash around awhile. I may not sleep tonight.

I didn't even think of using a bullet behavior, which elimnates the need for the instance variables (although you do have to make sure bullet speed is initially set to zero.)

I also didn't know you could use both a platform and a bullet behavior on the same sprite!

Makes me wonder "What else don't I know?"

Don't answer that. <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

This may give you some ideas.

<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/57899112/NearestButterflyPursuitEvents.PNG" border="0">

The .capx is here:

NearestButterflyPursuit.capx

(Edited. Previous version didn't go to the nearest object.)

Oba! Great job! You have raised the bar for me on what a first game can be. I am still learning, but I hope to make my first game in C2, too.

(N�o sou brasileira, mas muitos anos atr�s, quando era menina, eu morava no Rio. Ainda tenho saudades daqueles dias.)

Here is a game I am working on as of right now and just wanted to know if it would work for this competition.

Each color blue box are rotate-able.

http://hawj.info/game/puhz/

It seems to me that if you add widgets that provide the ability to rotate layers or the layout as part of your puzzle it would work. For example, consider a level where you have the ball positioned below the target and don't provide an elevator--there appears to be no solution. But if when the ball rolls it flips a switch that rotates the layer or the layout, voila! It can be something that only gets unlocked in later levels, so your current levels would still be good. It is certainly an integral part of game play since there isn't a way to solve without rotating.

Anyway, that's my opinion. Maybe someone else can chime in here.

Well i maybe shouldn't have called it a bug since i'm not sure it's a bug so that's why i didn't report of course. It's just that i couldn't find a solution till now. When the layer rotates it doesn't trigger the collisions correctly. Maybe there's some other factors involved. I'll keep scrutinizing my project to find the culprit.

Did you see this thread?

Physics problem when rotating layers