Love The idea! good work!

Thank you!

No comments on an indie-made old school style platformer? I am shocked! (Not really).

I hope at least some of you guys gave it a try though

Boss Man is a 2D sidescrolling platformer I created and released just last week. It is my first larger scale game and I'm really anxious to get some feedback on it!

This game is also my love letter to the platformers of the 90's such as Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country, so if you enjoyed those games you should feel right at home playing this one.

The plot involves our main character, Leon, being fired from his job for no given reason after years of torturous work and labor under his terrible bosses. Responsible for the firing was company CEO Boss Man, who decided to personally give Leon the boot himself. After a mental breakdown from years and years of stress, Leon decides to storm Boss Tower, the place of his former employment, to take revenge on Boss Man and his corporate stooges, and maybe even restore the once reputable company while he's at it!

Trailer:

Screenshots:

Unfortunately the game was a little too big in size for most HTML5 sites, but I have gotten it on Gamejolt and Kongregate. I am also waiting on approval from IndieDB and looking into Desura. I want to get as many eyes on this (Therefore getting more critique) as possible!

Gamejolt (For Downloads): http://gamejolt.com/games/boss-man/95589

Kongregate (For Browser Gameplay): http://www.kongregate.com/games/Megabeard15/boss-man

Hope you guys enjoy and please let me know what you think!

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Megabeard15/boss-man

About 50 Plays so far...

This is the first time I've released a larger game, so it ended up being too big of a file for a lot of HTML5 hosting sites. Kongregate luckily just barely met my file size limitations and I've uploaded it to there.

The game is called Boss Man, a love letter to the old 16-bit platformers of the 90's such as Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World

Hope you guys enjoy!

Just to add to the discussion a bit, GIMP is kind of like the free version of photoshop. I don't think it's quite as good, but for about 95% of the things you can do in PS, you can also do in GIMP to some extent. So it's a nice, free alternative.

I'll also say as a GraphicsGale user that it's decent, but the UI could use improvement. It feels like an outdated program when I open it up, and the process of creating transparent backgrounds in images is like pulling teeth (In fact, I've found putting it on GIMP and deleting the background is a lot faster). Once again though, it's free, so if you can deal with the quirks, it's hard to go wrong with the ones I mentioned and frankly most graphics programs.

Just wanted to chime in here. I also tried uploading a game over 30 MB and it didn't work. I got a 404 error message. I seem to remember there being a 10 MB limit for the old arcade. Is there a new limit these days that I just can't find around the forums?

It's impossible to create complex games easily ; the complexity of the underlying technology always reflects the complexity of the games. Which also means a stronger constraint on the user to understand the technology in order to use it efficiently.

Ease of use, functionalities, efficiency, portability, cost, etc. One single solution cannot do it all, because these are conflicting requirements.

There are already lots of other solutions to create games - native programming frameworks, portable engines, visual tools, complex modular editors, etc. C2 fits nicely between all these and provides a good answer to a collection of problems.

I think this hits the hammer on the head for the most part. Something that has complex natures should be at least somewhat complex to create. Every program has a weakness, but the question is, are these necessary weaknesses? I'm not even going to pretend I understand the amount of work and/or money it would entail to create native export options for several platforms. But at the same time, I have a very hard time believing that a lot of these issues don't go away with the use of native exports. Using HTML5 wrappers bloats the size of the project (Regardless of optimization, there's no denying this) and causes bugs that wouldn't appear in an HTML5 game normally for unexplained reasons. There are workarounds, sure, but the way I see it, if you're going to spend hours trying to find a workaround to bugs and optimization issues that wouldn't normally apply to your game if it was released as intended (HTML5 release), doesn't that defeat the purpose? Might as well suck it up and learn a program that's not as good as C2 in that case, right?

To answer the OP- I think it depends on your needs specifically. Construct 2, in my mind, has the best UI and method of programming a game, hands down. However, don't plan on having a smooth release for your game with anything outside an HTML5 export. So if you plan on making a browser-only HTML5 game, there is absolutely no better choice than C2.

However, if you want to export to other formats - Be it Windows exe, Mac, Linux, consoles, and possibly even phone (IOS and Android as I've heard a good amount of issues come from the wrappers bloating the game's size, therefore affecting performance), you may want to consider other options such as GM. It is possible to use 3rd party sources to create something like an exe or app using wrappers, but as noted before, they tend to bloat the size of the project and affect performance. There are also many known issues with these 3rd parties where there's not much Scirra themselves can do. We're pretty much at those company's mercy if and when we encounter bugs trying to create something that honestly doesn't seem like was meant to be created using C2. Native exporters are a whole lot better, and that's something GM does have.

Personally, I don't like the archaic nature of GM; I can understand the appeal, but you can't seem to do much in that program without learning its' native language, GML. In that sense it's probably great for people who want to learn a simple programming language. For me and probably several other C2 users, we use this sort of software because we can't/don't want to learn an entire language to make a good game, so it kind of defeats the purpose. It's also not the most powerful language either. I've always kind of wondered why people don't just resort to Unity if all they do is program in GML anyway. Maybe it's a price thing, or it could be more difficult to program in Unity, I'm not 100% sure. Unless like I said, you're a beginner programmer looking to learn an easy language. Also, the level editor of GM drives me bonkers, but that could also just be me.

I can't say for sure because I've only just started trying it on the side, but if you want something similar to C2, but with native exports, Clickteam Fusion 2.5 may be a good option. From what I can find, this comes with some catches though. The reason Construct and Clickteam are so similar in appearance, as the story goes, is the dudes at Scirra liked what the program could do, but had become fed up with the constant issues that kept cropping up with it, making simple programming tasks a giant chore when creating games. I believe that's what got them started making CC as a more friendly alternative. So one would expect to find some very odd issues popping up here, and it wouldn't be quite as easy to get things done as it is in C2. Fusion is also more expensive if you want the ability to export to all its available platforms. It's upwards of $400 USD.

So the way I see it (And I've been pondering this for a while since it affects me as well). It may be good to have an alternative tool for if/when you aren't able to suit your exporting needs with C2. What you go with depends on what you need, but in my honest opinion, I don't see a whole lot of reason to go the GM route unless you're looking to learn an easy programming language!

Some top down z movement testing, in a combat scenario. Similar to what you see in games like secret of mana.

Really liking your sword movements in the gif above. I've noticed a lot of top-down action rpgs struggle to convey movement of the sword with simple things such as walking in different directions, but here it looks good!

And since this is your first game, at least i guess with the current team, it did and it will do quite fine. Very few people did well when they launched their first game, beside those lucky to be the first on the first years of indie gold rush on steam.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I haven't played Airscape, but just looking at it I can tell there was plenty of polish and talent that went into it. I hope this experience doesn't discourage you completely. 3 and a half years can definitely build up some high expectations, so I can understand the disappointment.

However, a lot of the time, commercial success comes after a lot of failure. I like to point to the fellow who made 5 Nights at Freddy's. He had several games beforehand that were considered flops. He was told that his animalectronic looking characters were too creepy to be any fun in his games. He took that "Failure" and made it into a success. Perhaps look hard at "What went wrong" in the post mortem and use it for your next game?

From the perspective of someone who was recently looking for a composer (Found someone last month), I think the fact that you have a music background will help if you want to charge higher prices, but (And again, this is from the perspective of me only) I would recommend staying on the lower end until you get game soundtracks specifically under your belt. People will be more willing to take a risk on you that way, and it's not really too big of a risk since you have the music background already. It'll get you a lot of interested people I think.

For exclusive music, I've seen prices range from $60-90 per minute of music. Non exclusive is usually around half that. These were for some fairly experienced composers with over 5 game soundtracks done. I felt it was reasonable, but at the same time, as someone making a game that I won't be profiting from, I was hoping for something cheaper. I eventually found someone who, like you, has a music background, but was looking to work on their first game soundtrack. He charges less than half of what the experienced composers do, so I was a lot more willing to take the risk (Which, again, didn't feel like a big one since he has a solid background in music), and so far it has really paid off on my end. I think that once my game is complete and out there, it'll pay off for him as well so that he can point to his best tracks as examples for others to look at and therefore make more money than last time.

That is the route I recommend you go if you're just starting out in game music. It may not sound like an attractive prospect, but in the end, I think it would help put you on the map. That's probably how most experienced game composers started out. Cheap and/or free even.

"The dilemma being that I have a very artistic brain and no matter how much you explain coding and scripting to me, I will never get it, so I decided to use a simple ready editor."

Black Rabbit;

If you want to write a real game in C2, you will need to understand scripting and coding. Even though it uses event sheets you will still end up using functions, static variables with local scope etc. So C2 isn't going to solve your basic dilemma--which is you say you can't code.

I suggest you see what you can do with RPG maker ACE--you should be able to get some kind of game out of that since it is mostly just a database.

yours

Winkr7

I 100% agree with this post.

However, if you're anything like me (I too couldn't comprehend programming 2-3 years ago), you will pick up on the logic and you'll begin to understand programming. You may be able to create a small game without programming knowledge, but as I found out the hard way, even if you manage to string together some events, it will not perform well unless you've optimized and used proper techniques for optimizing. Just keep that in mind.

To the Original Poster: Construct 2, hands down, has the best interface and method of programming a small 2D style game. Having tried Stencyl, Game Maker, and CTF 2.5, I can safely say that C2 is the most intuitive. However, there is a caveat. As you mentioned, it exports to HTML5 only, and while some others have already mentioned that you can use what we call "Wrappers" to make that export seem like a downloadable game or app on the phone, you'll want to keep in mind that these things are created by third party companies and are handled by the as well. If you have any issues with these third parties (And my understanding is that there are a LOT of issues), you're at their mercy.

For this reason, I can't really recommend C2 for what you described.

It really is a shame because to me, native exporters are all C2 is really missing to completely dominate their competition. HTML5 feels like a very limited export right now, which is ironic since it's supposed to be so flexible. After I finish my current game, I'll be seeking an alternate game engine to suit my export needs.