Announce trailer of my game Solitaria. It's a homage to atmospheric adventure platformers of the late 80's and 90's - it is very heavily inspired by Super Metroid in both tone and gameplay. It's probably about 1/3 of the way through development at the moment so if it sounds like your cup of tea, feel free to follow development

I always think of the developers when tossing up on buying something from Steam - steam takes a 30% cut + you have the steam DRM to contend with, while pretty non intrusive it's still DRM and may give you trouble once in a while. It's a no brainer I think, I always try to buy from the devs direct. You can always add the shortcut into steam anyway.

Having a midi keyboard is great to visualise notes and construct things like chords, generally though unless you're a keyboard player it's not that necessary when writing computer music - useful for sure, but not mandatory by any stretch. I started out writing using my pc keyboard and I often find myself reaching for that instead of the midi - once you learn the mappings it's fine - actually often faster if you're using a tracker just to use the PC keyboard. If you want something to visualise the notes better though, a small midi keyboard is great - you can often get 25 key versions that easily fit on your desktop with your pc keyboard - they're cheaper and good for workflow.

Hi, your game sounds really interesing. I love metroidvanias and am making one myself. I think a good way to implement non violent options in games is to reward the player for using that approach. Eg perhaps when an enemy is stunned rather than killed they drop a valuable powerup, but if they are killed they explode and it is instead destroyed. You could also use it for dynamic changes in gameplay, eg if a robot enemy is stunned perhaps an electric field will appear around them, while the robot is incapacitated it can't chase you but now becomes dangerous in a different way as if you walk into it you'll get hurt so depending on what else is going onscreen it becomes a different kind of obstacle. You could set things up like a master switch that pacifies all robots in an area, but to get to it requires a puzzle or a very difficult platforming challenge to get to, so it gives the player a choice to either go in guns blazing, or go off on a difficult tangent for a while to get a more substantial reward. Some quick ideas for non lethal ways to handle enemies:

stealth/invisibility (maybe with a time limit or other limitation, so that there is a constant challenge pattern)

Using shadows to hide in for safety

Freezing enemies (eg the freeze beam in Metroid)

Taking control of enemies (eg like in Oddworld)

Playing dead

Getting them to fight amongst themselves

You could check out some non metroidvania games where the protagonist is in a dangerous world but can't actually defend themselves for ideas on these kind of gameplay elements. Off the top of my head stuff like Limbo/Inside, Oddworld (the first 2 games) - I can't think of any more at the moment but there will be a bunch....

Just downloaded 8 tones and had a quick play, it looks pretty ok - quite basic, but should cover your chiptune needs and get you started. There are a couple of different tracker paradigms, they do share similarities but there could still be quite a learning curve when switching between software once you're used to one. Another suggestion I have for you if you're interested in creating this kind of music on your phone is http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ - Sunvox is basically a modular synthesizer built into a tracker - if you keep the settings simple you have everything you need to write chiptunes, but it also has a lot of cutting edge features and you can write very polished modern music with this thing if you need to. The huge advantage of something like Sunvox is that you can start a project on your phone and then polish it up on your PC, or vice versa. It's really handy having a desktop version as well as a mobile version, as while it's fun to write stuff on the go on mobile, it's more tedious and sometimes you just want to jump on to a mouse and keyboard and get stuff done! The guy who wrote Sunvox also has a bunch of other really cool software - could check out his pixitracker as well http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/pixitracker/

One very good way to learn how to track is to open up music modules in a tracker. This is how I learned many years ago. If you open up other people's songs and you will see how they are put together - it's a good way to see what the different tracker effects do as well, as to newcomers they can be very daunting - often they are programmed in with obscure hexadecimal values that won't make any sense at first - when you can see a track layed out visually though and isolate channels and instruments etc and generally just play around with it, it will start to make sense. There are thousands of tracker modules available online in places like http://www.modarchive.org - if you do a search for chiptune on there you will find a bunch of modules to download, then if you open those up with Milkytracker you will be able to see how the music is put together.

For chiptunes, trackers are pretty much the way to go. While you could write one on any modern DAW, but the tracker interface is really great for chiptunes. Milkytracker is great and will do whatever you need and more but will have a steep learning curve and you'll have to prepare and load your own chip samples into it. Haven't tried Pulseboy but it will probably also do what you need. If you want something out of the box you could try famitracker - which can be used to create tracks for the NES - if you want a pretty 'authentic' chiptune sound - your typical saw/triangle/noise - it's quite robust though and quite useful for sound design once you understand it.

I re-use a lot of my events in different projects and it is a huge timesaver. It really just comes down to planning to do this and always using the same naming conventions. Like Sol said, generic names work best as they're easy to remember and will be relevantly named between projects. Once you start to consciously plan to reuse events and name objects accordingly it becomes pretty painless.

Fantastic find! Thanks.

The detectors don't need to be solid - you can still check for a collision with the enemy and make it react on collision.

Hi, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. But your coin has a bullet behaviour applied to it, so when it spawns it starts moving to the right. So maybe remove that bullet behaviour and instead put a pin behaviour on the coin. Then you can spawn the coins and they will hang in the air - then test for a collision - if the coin is overlapping the platform pin it to the platform - it will then move up with the platform.

Hi, I've got a save/load system that uses Construct's default state save/load. This is nice and easy to implement and for the most part works really well. However, I'm thinking if I release the game, say on Steam and it needs an emergency patch, if I update the game and then redistribute it - what will happen to my customer's save games? Will they be useless? I've wanted to avoid having to use local storage/dumping a whole load of variables etc - I'll go down that route if I have to though.