I'd like to calculate the distance the player has traveled over the course of the game for a stat. The hero is controlled with the 8 direction behavior. How can I track the distance traveled if I know his speed every tick from 8 direction?

(Sorry, this is a "I'm in the 7th day of the game jam and I'm having trouble thinking about math properly" question.)

Is anyone participating in Procedural Death Jam or its more specific sister-event, 7 Day Roguelike Challenge?. I'm planning on doing the former and have never made a game with procedural elements before, so it should be quite an adventure.

Any tips on procedural content generation with Construct 2?

I remember helping a friend in med school study for the pharmaceutical stuff by making mnemonic devices for all the root words for various drugs, and turning them into creatures. They were pretty terrible and probably not helpful (I remember LobStar, but I don't remember what he was supposed to help us remember!) All the same, the idea of turning pharmaceuticals into mnemonic monsters always stuck with me, so your pokemon analogy sounds delightful.

Specifics:

1. What kind of game might accomplish my goal of commiting to memory many facts?

I think your idea of turning memorizable facts into stats is a good start. The challenge you may face (and the challenge of many educational games), is these attributes may not directly translate into a well-balanced game experience. But like I said, educational games deal with this all the time, so it might be worth it to check out something like theIGDA Learning and Education Games SIG, or a similar group, to address that angle of it

2. Would a game similar to Pokemon be buildable with Construct 2? What are the strengths and limitations of this program building such game? Any tutorials?

I think Construct 2 would be fine for this, because the logic is very turn-based, so you wouldn't need super high performance. No tutorials come to mind offhand though.

3. How well would this sort of game translate to touch screen platforms?

If it's very menu-based, I don't think it would be a problem at all. For the "moving around the world" part you could experiment with more touch centric controls (touch a place and the player moves to that spot, for example), but you could go either way.

There was a discussion some weeks ago on how to approach payment for hiring a freelance artist, so I thought people might find this article handy about typical freelance practices. It is written from the perspective of the freelancer, but I think it has useful info for people who plan to hire freelancers as well.

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/WillHendrickson/20140226/211797/Freelancing_Without_Being_FreelyLanced.php

I especially think the Trust section is interesting (in the previous discussion, I remember the potential client worrying about how to pay the freelancer in such a way that they didn't get ripped off. It's good to see that this worry goes both ways)

I guess that depends a little on your own credibility as well. If you are a credible contractor then the artist could invoice you upon completion of the task and you'd pay the agreed upon amount, and they would trust you to do so.

I'm guessing arranging payment at a halfway point could also work, but then you get into the nebulous realm of defining what "halfway" means. Whatever you decide to do, it will probably involve a lot of back and forth with your artist to set up the contract to define what exactly each thing is worth and what the pay schedule is.

I've been lucky in that the contractor artist I worked with I knew really well as a reliable person, so we did option 2 and he would invoice every 2 weeks for the hours he worked. It worked out well, but like you said, you have to be assured that the artist is trustworthy and competent.

You can approach this a number of ways, here are a few different methods:

1. Contract for a specific length of time for a fixed amount, like "we're hiring you for 20 hours a week for 6 weeks." and they get paid on a timeline kind of like a salaried paycheck.

2. Instead of paying for a fixed time frame, Contract based on the artist's hourly fee for a specific number of hours, but have the actual weekly hours potentially vary. So this would be, like "we're hiring you for 20 hours between now and x date" but the number of hours per week could vary. Maybe you do 5 hours this week and 10 hours next week. In this case, the artist would be sending invoices at an agreed schedule for how much you pay them, like a time sheet. Doing a method like this would work well for an artist who needs flexibility, but who you really, REALLY trust to get their stuff done in the allotted time.

3. Instead of doing it based on time, define segments of work based on their worth, and then the artist gets paid when the work is complete. So, like, you would agree on something like "doing this sprite sheet and all the animations is worth x dollars." and when they complete the task they get the x dollars, regardless of if it took them an hour or a week. This can be useful if your project is at a stage where you have very defined segments of work to be contracted out, but it can be more complicated to figure out up front than something like an hourly fee.

Those are just a couple of ways I know about, there are probably other methods that other people can suggest.

I would agree that I don't really see Project Spark as a competing "game making tool" so much as a game with heavy built-in modding features.

I actually only played a little bit of the beta because it felt too much like work to me, but I could imagine the sorts of people who it is aiming for as its audience and how they would really enjoy it. I had a similar experience with Little Big Planet.

lunarray

I updated the plugin and it now works as expected, I guess I had an older version than I realized. Thanks!

Is this behavior built to support multiple tween behaviors on the same object? I've used that method without issue except that when one tween ends, it fires the On End event for all tween behaviors.

Example:

http://storage.wertle.com/construct2/DoubleTween.capx

I have two different tween behaviors on the object, PositionTween and ScaleTween, but when PositionTween ends, the On ScaleTween end event fires.

Is this a bug or should I just only be using one tween behavior per object? Thanks!

Edit: Fixed the link

I'm also a huge fan of the Lost Garden "Design Log" method for small team projects, though it doesn't really scale up when you get really big team sizes.

At my company, we designers will often make visual design docs to convey a pitch or a general idea for a feature, with the intent that it's a one page glance that can get everyone on the team on the same page about the vision for the feature, and is highly visual. They've proven to be very useful in early development.

Even those fall out of date quickly, though, and you have to be on top of archiving and culling them. Nothing worse than a new person coming onto the team and try to catch themselves up based on outdated docs.

Do you have a .capx file we could take a look at?

How does the debugger display 3D arrays?

I have a 3D array that I'm using to keep track of level statuses in my world map, but I'm having trouble deciphering how to interpret a multi-dimensional array in the debugger.

The dimensions represent how the levels are broken down, so in my case:

X = which Area is it in

Y = which Level is it

Z = which Challenge is it (each level can have several different challenges)

The values can be either locked, unlocked, or completed.

Here's a screenshot of what the array looks like in the debugger

<img src="http://storage.wertle.com/construct2/array.PNG" border="0" />

It seems like the display is missing a dimension, or that I'm just seeing the values for the first levels in each area and something else happens farther off on the right, which I can't see because I can't scroll over there (it just cuts off).

Is there any way to get a more thorough look at the contents of one of these sorts of arrays in the debugger?