Now I haven't actually played that game, but imagine you click one spot and drag along and it creates track right?

First off when you create a new object for your track pieces, I suggest adding 1 animation for each piece of track you will have. So animation 1 is straight track, animation 2 is right corner, and so on. Now, on any frame of any animation, select the image point button on the left of the image window (looks like a little target).

When you click on that, a little window will pop up showing you the list of image points, the first one being called 'origin'. Now, add 4 more image points, and right click on them. Then choose 'quick assign' and make one left, one right, one top and one bottom, then name them appropriately. Once you have done them all, again right click each one and select 'apply to all animations'. And now you have image points on every side of every piece of track!

Now you do: 'is mouse pressed' + is overlapping track (inverted): create track (there are many ways to make the new track snap to grid, but I don't have time to go into it. If unsure, just look around the tutorials - there's a lot of info for it!).

Now create some small square images called 'detector left/right/etc.'. Give them the variable 'track UID'.

Then have an event: 'On track created': track spawn object 'detector left on image point 'left', 'detector right' on image point 'right', and so on. Then on detector created: 'set 'track UID' to 'track(track.count-1).uid''. This will make sure that they only affect the latest piece of track.

Now you can do something like:

'For each track: if detector left is overlapping track + detector left track UID = track.uid, detector up is overlapping track + detector up track UID = track.uid: set track animation to 'turn up''

This isn't 100%, you will need to decide many things like when to destroy the detectors, whether the track can split in 3 ways, etc., etc., but this is the general method I would start with.

Sorry I don't have more time to help, it does sound like a fun project to work on :)

Thanks Yan! It was really interesting just to see a different workflow. One suggestion I have for a future video is complex saving, as in how to manage saving the game in an RPG. I have my own autosave system, but it is very labour intensive to use and was a real pain to setup, so I would love to see how you tackle it.

Just off the top of my head, you could try this to automatically set the rail section to the right piece (corner, straight, etc.) while dragging:

Whenever you create a new piece for the rail, spawn a detector object on all sides (set image points for left, right, top, bottom and spawn them on those). Then as you drag past and create a new piece, check which detector it's overlapping. With that information you can set the pieces of rail to the right animations (left corner, straight, etc.). Make sure to destroy all the detectors after a certain number of rails have been placed.

I'm just heading out the door, so sorry it's not very precise. If you want I can clarify a bit when I return. Good luck!

I remember when I did playtesting for a company along with 2 other guys. The developers were amazed that none of us used multi-touch, as they thought it could only be played that way and it was a big design consideration.

So yeah, get some people you don't/barely know to have a shot as often as possible. Half Brick (the Fruit Ninja/Jetpack Joyride guys) would go out each week or so and just hand the game to strangers on the street to get their impression of 2 minutes gameplay.

And polishing can go on until the end of time. To use Fruit Ninja again, it took 3 days to make the game itself and 3 months of polish.

I'd suggest going through and getting everything to the bare functional requirements (backgrounds scrolling cleanly, no clipping in movements, smooth layout transitions, etc.) and then when you have the whole picture in front of you, you can see what really needs the attention. Nothing worse than spending a week on something only to find it has made minimal impact and then discover one section of your menus looks like an abattoir floor.

I found the simplest solution is to just use instance variables on arrays/dictionaries as they don't seem to reset when you change layouts. Lets you name and sort your groups of variables too, a big plus!

So if you want to access variables that are just for that level, you just compare to the corresponding array. Downside is you can't clone them for some reason, so if you have heaps of variables to add it becomes very tedious.

WaterlooErik - Phew, I can only imagine how busy you are...thanks for your help with this and I hope developing for BB is actually this easy!

Good luck!

WaterlooErik - Success! I finally got it to work. Out of curiosity, any idea why the first attempt didn't work? Also, how long do you think it will take until I know if it passed or not?

WaterlooErik - I tried it again and it comes up with an error saying "Code signing request failed because this version of the application or package has been previously signed. Please increment the version<s> and try signing again."

Also sent you the email.

WaterlooErik - I got all the way to upload the BAR, but got this:

"Bar is not RDK signed Bar is not AUTHOR signed This bar contains unsigned entries which have not been integrity-checked."

I followed the steps all the way through no problem until now, not sure what to do next.

WaterlooErik - Yeah I completed the vendor account, but the email said I now have to send in copies of my ID. You just said they are approved on the spot, so do I still have to do this?

WaterlooErik - I successfully got to the submission stage and just want to know if I need to do something before submitting in order to get the $100? Like do I need to sign in somewhere? Provide bank details? Etc.

Thanks WaterlooErik, it really does appear quite simple now. Just waiting for my sign keys to arrive.