Braxmule, awesome find on the Pacing video. Every game designer should watch that.

I believe if a level seems like it can be beat, but the player fails due to their own lack of knowledge or skill, then it can be considered challenging and fun. The player knows that if they learn that skill or knowledge then they can beat the level.

On the other hand, if the player feels that their inability to complete the level is due to forces outside of their control, like random death or knowledge that is not generally available or available within the context of the game, then they will get frustrated and the game won't be fun.

So, in my opinion, what makes a game fun is not as much about the level of difficulty, but is more about giving the player the feeling that they can beat the game if they can just improve their own skills or use/expand their own knowledge, no matter the difficulty.

One personal example that comes to mind is —'s The Convergence. There wasn't much help at the beginning, and it took a while to figure out what to do, but everytime I failed, I knew it was my fault and that it was possible to beat. If there had been randomly appearing wormholes that killed me, or I needed to know how to calculate the integral of a multi-variable function, then I would have angrily stopped playing.

The key is to make the player feel like they are in control and that they have everything they need at hand to beat the game.

—, nice game. it reminds me of the arcade games from the 80s that would eat my quarters because i would die so much and so often. <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

01lifeleft, nice demos. i was not able to protect my girlfriend. :-\

Regarding the random treasure, does this help?

RandomTreasure

Thanks Ashley. And thanks Mipey for bringing it up. I forgot to ask.

I really like the idea of a theme-based competition, with the game type left up to the developer. I think breaking the games up into categories would be useful, but I had no issue in the first competition with them different categories being mixed.

Have there been any internal discussion about the length of the competition?

The plug-in has been updated. It now will return the hardware scan code, the Unicode code, and the Unicode character, in separate expressions. I deprecated the Code expression, so the plug-in should still work with existing projects.

I was also wondering about how to use common.js.

JackieChan, I will take a run at it, but I'm not familiar with the List Box in CC. Is it like a multi-select list box, or a drop-down box, or a combo box?

Strange. I am sure I used the bitwise OR to separate the two flags when I first tried, and it didn't work. Must be gremlins. <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Thanks Ashley!

I am trying to deprecate an expression in the Keycode plug-in, but I keep getting this error when I try to open a capx that requires that expression:

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Construct 2 Check failure

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Check failure! This is probably a bug:

ACE table: expression does not specify one return flag - did you specify more than one, or forget it entirely?

Condition: return_flags == 1

File: c:\c2\source\exporters\html5\..\..\common\ERAHelpers.h

Line: 245

Function: void __cdecl era::ACETable::AddExpression(int,int,const class std::basic_string<wchar_t,struct std::char_traits<wchar_t>,class std::allocator<wchar_t> > &,const class std::basic_string<wchar_t,struct std::char_traits<wchar_t>,class std::allocator<wchar_t> > &,const class std::basic_string<wchar_t,struct std::char_traits<wchar_t>,class std::allocator<wchar_t> > &,const class std::basic_string<wchar_t,struct std::char_traits<wchar_t>,class std::allocator<wchar_t> > &,void (__cdecl *)(const class era::StaticResult **,int,class era::StaticEvaluation *))

Build: release 66 (64-bit) checked

Component: HTML5 exporter

(Last Win32 error: 0)

You are using a 'checked' release of Construct 2, intended for testing, which causes certain errors to be reported this way. Hit Ctrl+C to copy this messagebox - it's useful information for the developers, so please include it with any bug reports! Click 'Abort' to quit (unsaved data will be lost!),'Retry' to turn off messages for this session and continue, or 'Ignore' to continue normally.

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Abort   Retry   Ignore   

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Here is the updated plug-in with the deprecated expression: dl.dropbox.com/u/38038537/wastrel_keycode_updated.zip

Here is my test capx, that used the deprecated expression: dl.dropbox.com/u/38038537/TestKeyCode.capx

It seems like the ef_deprecated flag is not being recognized, or that I need to combine it with the ef_return_int flag or something.

Thanks!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I am running under R66, if that matters.

No bug here.

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600

Windows 7, 64-bit