Couldn't agree more.

In my personal experience, all the games that I enjoyed are ones that developers have shown to really enjoy making the game. It's kinda a weird feeling - as you play such game you can just feel how elaborate an action was implemented, how detailed an action was, like you're reading the developer's mind.

I think global variable is referring to the variable unit on top of the event sheet, not global storage like dictionary. In contrary, I see a lot of people recommending global variables as the fix of a problem, especially for transferring data across layouts.

What I suspect the problem is that, if you have a lot of layouts doing their own things and you use global variables to do this, the scope of the variable becomes blurry quickly. Like, a monster in layout 1 has a global health of 10. You hit it and it's reduced to 5. In layout 2 that's supposed to be reset to 10 but its health is going to stay at 5 because of what happened in layout 1.

Dictionary and array, I believe, are highly encouraged. You can even make multiple dictionaries instead of just one depending on how you want to organise the data.

Game selection isn't the console's own fault. But I can see where the criticism come from, unfortunately.

Thank you for doing this. This is also going to be helpful for the whole RPG genre in construct 2.

Thank you again Kiira, that's a pretty awesome job. Get some rest and take care of yourself!

You can see how many posts there had been in yesterday alone under New Post, the button on top.

I agree with GeometriX that most people come to this forum for technical things rather than community discussion, as there are many other places on the internet dedicated to game design and development philosophies.

The documentation and FAQ have also become so comprehensive that not many new questions could be asked.

Yeah the ajax fix is a blessing, but XML object is still listed as incompatible in Ashley's export to Cocoonjs page. I think XML is incompatible on CocoonJS's end.

A finite state machine (spreadsheet) style model should still be a good alternative though. Something like this:

<font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">

      |Normal|Happy |Sad   |

Joe   |Yo.   |lol   |Nope |

Doe   |Sup. |rofl |gtfo |

Mary |Hi.   |Haha |...   |

Sue   |Hello.|Teehee|...   |

</font>

Very controversial, I reckon. There are good points and there are some that really just come down to personal preference. It also seems to target AAA games in general - a lot of the points in regards to irritation aren't common with indie games.

Not sure why the namesake "dictionary", but it's like the idea of a hash table, where you refer to data instantly by its key instead of trying to find the data by looping through the entire table. (Dictionary is still different than a hash though, hash cannot be looped and dictionary can.)

The difference between array and dictionary only start to show when you're handling thousands of data. I don't know if Mass Effect even has that many dialogues. So it's a personal preference on how you want to search the dialogue.

XML is made to be a tree structure. I didn't mention XML because I thought it's still having problems with CocoonJS for mobile conversion. Not sure if there's any update about that now.

Good job!

A list of arrays with different coordinates suggested by farflamex is great too, just for ease of remembering all of them - the array can remember them for you.

It sounds easy, but it's going to be a really complex game when you actually do it.

I suggest you learn the basics of the engine first by following the tutorials on Construct 2, just to get a feel around the engine interface. Then you will have better idea on how to approach your game from there.

Yeah, if your pit leads outside the layout then the player is going to continuously lose health non-stop, instead of subtracting 1 only once. You might want to relocate the player's coordinates immediately just so that won't happen.