To answer your question about why are the so called "Idle games" so appealing is actually pretty easy. I think even Extra Credits did an episode on youtube about the toppic.

Games like these are pretty much created in order to scratch our "itch for multitasking" since they require minimal effort to play yet those increasing numbers still give us the satisfying feeling of making a progress. I know I was put off by the candy box since all I saw was a number and a button. But then I gave it another chance later on and the game started unfolding itself revealing more and more elements to it. It's actually interesting concept which you don't see very often.

And already there are examples of what people could do with it. To name a few, Candy Box, Candy Box 2 and Dark room added the "coffeebreak roguelike" aspects as they added the story and exploring with loot and so on. Then there is Cookie Clicker which got me hooked even though it's just about generating more and more cookies per second to buy more and more expensive upgrades that will help you generate even more cookies per second.

The guys behind cookie clicker even teamed up with adventure quest and made a game where you generate gems which you use to raise a dragons.

To answer your second question, yes it is possible to create such a game with C2. Since it's all about math, all you need is a loop and couple of variables that'd interact with each other. (Base cookies per second, some multipliers, things that'd add or deduct from the cookie bank, and events which would check whether certain cookie count was reached in order to "enable" more features for the unfolding effect).

I think there are few things to watch out for in terms of memory and CPU usage since without careful optimisation it could get out of the hand pretty fast.

Anonnymitet Yeah. I guess I'll have to redesign. Somebody said that it was a bit too "sparkly". I wanted to give it the sense of speed, but seems like pulsars wasn't very good idea. Reduced the parallax values for background stars (single pixels) and I'll probably replace the stars with "speed lines" (or so called "space dust" used in games like wing commander used to give sense of motion. Even though I guess that in case of top down scrolling shooter, the sense of motion is already there.) Thanks for the feedback, I'll see what could be tweaked.

I've started working on very basic shoot em up because I thought something along the lines of "Everyone and their mom is trying to make metroid vania platformer as their first game, but why shouldn't I go for something that I know how to put together mechanically?"

So here's the screen capture of how the game looks so far.

Obviously it's early work in progress since it lacks stuff like GUI, and requires some tweaks.

Now in this gif in particular there is a mistake I didn't notice until after the capture - the explosion animation for the enemies is upside down as I forgot to flip it after adding it to the project.

Also I need a name for the game, I wasn't able to come up with one other than "Generic shmup"

Before I start, it'd be good idea to mention that It's been a while since I last launched Construct 2 and didn't pay too much attention to feature updates. Searching the forums didn't give me any relevant results so if the following has been adressed in any shape or form, I apologize.

With that out of the way,

I'm using Sony Vegas for editing videos and such, even though that program has nothing to do with Construct, it does have an interesting feature that allows new user to understand the program fairly quickly - The feature I'm talking about is called "Show me how" tutorials. Basicaly it's some sort of interactive tutorial which leads the user through several steps showing exactly how to execute some basic tasks. For me, this hand holding seems to be way more effective way to learn how to use the program rather than watching endless videos on YouTube (Which,let's be honest here, may be made in poor quality with commentary of pre-teen child who barely seems to even know what they're doing which thankfully isn't case of C2) or spending countless hours reading through dozens of tutorials which might be informative and well written, yet somehow overwhelming not to mention the possibility of getting outdated due to speed of development process.

Since ShowMeHow tutorials are built in the program's interface itself, user can also try out the things and variables on the go without having to tab out to tutorial/video having to scroll up and down/rewind&replay various section of the tutorials and then tabbing back to program only to realize that the process described may not be valid anymore.

My question is - think there is a way to implement the "ShowMeHow" kind of tutorials into C2?

Hello!

I'm Michal Je?�bek, but since it's sometimes hard for people to pronounce (or even read the damn last name) properly, I tend to go around the internet as "Zeth". I live in Prague which is capital of small country known as "Czech Republic" which lays in centre of Europe (Well the actually the geological center of Europe is about 15 Km behind our Czech-German border but anyways).

I am sort of gaming freak.

Playing games is my free time hobby. Recently I got attracted to Indie Game developing scene (especially thanks to Minecraft and Terraria). Not so long ago, I got encouraged by Kevin Glass (aka — on twitter) - the "Legends of Yore" to make my own game after I did a bug report for him. He literally said "You just solved the problem without seeing a piece of code. You got brains for it."

That was easier said than done, because besides of TurboPascal experience that taught me "How the program works" I don't know any programming language what so ever. I still wanted to make a game so I choosed to use some "Game making engine" instead. That's how I stumbled upon "Game Maker" which seemed to be really powerful tool providing one could learn to work with it. Though it is relatively easy to learn, and its own scripting language is similar to C++ (At least that's what I heard) I actually never heard about any game created by GM. Games built via "Torgue Game Builder" Are much more popular than that (e.g. Frozen Synapse, Space Pirates and Zombies). TGB though is a little bit more expensive, and it suffered with lack of documentation at the time I checked it out.

I was about to give up my dreams about game making before CokeAndCode mentioned one of articles about Construct 2's HTML5 performance comparison to other known engines on twitter. After a little investigation I downloaded Construct 2 and followed the first tutorial. I really liked it's simple "Event-Action" style and the fact that it's really easy to understand!

So here I am...Let's see what's gonna happen next!