It depends how many people with the skills to make one have actually bought the full version of C2. A friend was trying to make one but it's just not going to be possible with the 100 event limit. All the animations and movements were done, but at that point it reached over half of the events allowed in the free version. So it's just not going to happen unfortunately.

That would be my main guess as to why more "complex" games like RPGs aren't being made.

Yup that was the problem. The text box was only one line so the "new line" wasn't visible.

I assumed it would enlarge the text box itself when it created a new line but I guess not. Thanks.

<font color="red">I think I may have figured it out. Currently testing.

Yep figured it out. Turns out I wasn't thinking things through. I know this is probably an extremely basic thing but I'll write out how I did it just in case someone searches for this exact same thing (what are the chances someone doesn't know how to do this right? lol /facepalm)</font>

<font color="green">Give your player character an instance variable with however much health you want him to have. Create an event and select your player character, scroll down to instance variables and select compare instance variable. Select your characters health instance variable from the drop down menu (if it doesn't appear you didn't create one). Under comparison select Less than or equal and for the value select 0. Next add an action, select your player, scroll down to misc and select destroy. This says that when your characters life is less than or equal to zero, destroy him. Just follow the other tutorials if you want to create a health display. But in short create a global variable with the same value as your players starting health, then every time your player gets hit subtract 1 from the global variable as well. I don't know how to do it for platform games where you give them multiple retries, this is more for games similar to the Ghost Shooter beginners tutorial.</font>

====== Original Post =======

Hello again and sorry for asking for help again so soon. I want to add health to my player and display it as well. The problem is that when I try to set text it doesn't accept instance variables? I honestly can't even believe I'm having issues figuring this out. I thought this would have been the easiest part.

I have an instance variable for the player sprite called PlayerHealth set to 25. I created a text object called PlayerHealth as well. When I try to set text "HP: " & PlayerHealth to display the HP it says 'PlayerHealth' needs an expression after it, this is an object name so you need a dot and an expression name after it.

I tried to make a global variable instead of instance for the player to use but I can't add that to the player.

Basically I want to subtract health when monsters collide with the player, not instantly destroy the player, and it seems I can only use instance variables to do that but I am not sure how to get the health to display. I know I'm missing something, or several things, but I am not sure what. Any chance someone can help out?

Right now this is what I want to add to the player:

Or by using the usefull clamp

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23551572/C2/clampHealth.capx

I get that it's only a display (which is using global variables), I just don't know how to actually add health to the player properly so it gets subtracted when monsters collide with the player.

In the second event where it says "Score: " & Score & " - FPS: " & fps & newline & "Use arrow keys to move and click to shoot!"

I'm trying to figure out why I can't see "Use arrow keys to move and click to shoot!" in game. I do see the score and the FPS display but I can't see the instructions anywhere. What am I missing or why isn't that displaying?

This is an unedited file so I didn't mess with anything yet.

I don't understand it fully but when you resize a window you aren't adding (or subtracting in your case) pixels to make it move slower or faster. So it shouldn't affect the speed if someone resizes the window.

Hopefully this makes sense and I understood what you're trying to say.

Dwarf Fortress is easily the best indie game in almost every respect to me.

Other than that I enjoyed Dungeons of Dreadmor, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Desktop Dungeons, Dungeon Defenders, and Terraria. However I still think Dwarf Fortress easily beats any of those, and in my opinion it's probably the greatest game, not just indie game, ever created all around.

I'm glad you decided not to go with adding multiplayer yet. I feel like if you would have it would have caused a ton more problems and bugs, and your attention would be diverted to fixing all of that (since there's no doubt that people would be complaining about all the issues) instead of adding more features or making the program more user friendly etc...

I voted for more event features. I don't know if pathfinding or AI comes under the event features category but it would be great if we can have more types of movement for enemies. Like have it patrolling a set of coordinates (for example move randomly within 10,10 to 20,20 at some set speed). Every other program I've tried has also had fairly big issues with AI/pathfinding, and by issues I mean it's really difficult to do it effectively. A more automated way would be very nice, like a plugin or something.

------------

I guess this next part is more of a suggestion but I think it fits here. What I would like to see personally is prepackaged event sheets (or something) with very basic conditions and actions for generic genres. For example an RPG pack that includes all of the very basic things that come when creating an RPG. Health system, level up system, some sort of attributes for players like attack, defense, maybe inventory and a few basic and different types of AI (patrolling, random movement within a certain area, etc...). Just some basic things that all or most RPGs should have. This is not limited to RPGs it's just the best example I can think of since it has many different features to it.

Ohhhhh. Man I thought it was another variable or something and I wasn't seeing what it does (shows how tired I was lol). The quotes around it should have given it away that it's just a string. /facepalm

The bunny run is REALLY cool. I'll very likely use that. The issue I always have is that I try to understand everything as much as I possibly can, and it bothers me if I don't. It's the same issue I had in my math classes. I saw kids just breeze through it even though they didn't really understand what was going on, just doing what they're told. Eventually I did the same because me trying to understand every single thing was holding me back.

I have the same issues with programming (took a basic intro class to c++) so it's not the best thing for me to learn, I just have to kind of deal with it and leave things alone (for now). I understand how to do the examples and what I need to do, but don't "get" how some stuff works just that it does. Either way I'll look through bunny run some more and try that out. The comments do help a lot. And Construct helps with quickly trying things out since you don't have to manually type in everything, go back in, check for errors or how to change things around, delete everything and rewrite out everything in a different way, etc... So that's cool.

(for the most part I seem to understand bunnyhop much easier, so I will probably try that method first. The rest of the post is just longer explanation. Figured I'd add this in in case someone doesn't want to go through the giant post. I think I will figure out the bunnyhop though but feel free to post further explanations if you'd like, I am not opposed to that at all <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> I may also just start from scratch (the end of the tutorial) again to rewrite everything and make it less convoluted and messy. I don't want to deal with trying to reorganize it as it is now)

Thanks very much for those examples. They look so simple and concise which is kind of blowing my mind, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what is doing what. Right now I understand the second one more than the first example (mostly skimmed for now since it's late but I'm understanding the hop much easier), although I'm not sure which would be appropriate for my game. The area never changes in terms of shape and where you can and can't move, only the background changes. So I don't see how I could use the first one (it may very well be possible, I just wouldn't know how to, and I don't understand how it knows where to place each block as you progress in levels. I will have to try and make sense of it more later on).

I forgot to mention this in my OP but the screen between levels will be used for things like buying weapons or various upgrades. So I need it to stay on that screen until the "next" button is pressed, which will take you to the next level. I don't understand how the game knows to move to level 2 in BunnyHop vs level 3 or any other level. I'm guessing it obviously has something to do with levelnumber variable. I think I understand, I will try the bunnyhop method of moving through levels in a while (probably after I wake up). One question I have is on the Message Events sheet, the third txtMessage "set text to "Level" & LevelNumer & "complete!"

Where is the "complete!" from and what does it do? I didn't see that anywhere else. When I first run the game it starts off by saying Level 1 complete! then moves onto the first level. Just kind of odd and I wouldn't want it to start off like that if possible. I have some other concerns about the intermediate screens but I'll get to that after this I suppose. Can't try to fix/resolve everything at once (which I often try to do unfortunately).

I'd honestly probably need someone to break down each piece of code so I can understand it or explain it as it's being created and what purpose it serves so I can see what links to what. It's very possible I'm over-thinking things since I tend to do that. I'm also pretttty slow learning things, just takes a while for it to click. So far Construct seems to be the easiest to understand out of all the other programs I've tried though, so I have high hopes for actually being able to complete something.

So I finally managed to get my test game to move to the next level (had a few seemingly random issues preventing me from doing it...) but now I'm confused on how to proceed.

I'm using Ashley's beginners tutorial as a template just for your info, and I want to add multiple levels with screens inbetween them. For example. Currently level 1 you have to kill 10 things, once the kill counter reaches 10 you move to level 2 and have to kill 20 things and so on.

I want a screen inbetween so it's like: level 1 -> kill 10 to move to level 2 -> display a screen with a next button to proceed to level 2 -> click next -> start level 2 -> kill 20 to move to level 3 -> display screen with next button -> click next -> start level 3. And so on.

I want that screen for every level but I'm not sure how to do it properly. The only way I can think of is to create the blank screen with a next button manually for each level, and make each button point to the next level. It seems like a very tedious and bad way to do it. Isn't there any automatic way I can tell the game to progress? Or a way I can use the same layout with the next button for all transition screens? Something like "move to next level" when clicking on next rather than "move to level 2" and "move to level 3" on each one.

If you want to actually take a look at how it runs here it is, though I didn't change very much. I want to get the basic functionality working properly before I do anything else.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62853646/testgame/index.html

capx:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62853646/testgame/tutorial2levels.capx

If you know any better way to do anything I was trying to do please let me know. A lot of it seems very crude. Especially with creating levels. I basically just duplicated my first layout and renamed it, but I was having issues trying to change certain things only in one layout but it would change it in both. I deleted it, reduplicated and somehow worked fine the second or third time, so I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. I just didn't want to recreate every single thing since the levels are identical (excluding background color).