It's not really like that. The student has been checking in on Discord throughout the week as they've been working on the project.

Today, students presented their individual platform game projects to the class via Zoom web conferencing. Overall, presentations went well, but one student encountered a bug which only seems manifest when they shared their screen via Zoom.

They write, "[After class, I] kept starting the game up trying to recreate the issue and it would not occur. I even left the game running for a few minutes to see if it was just random timing and none of the drones fell off. Then I started up my own zoom call and shared my screen and played the game while it was being screen shared and the drones begin to fall again. I tested it multiple times and every time the game is being played through screen share it doesn't work."

They add, "So I've also tested a few other things, if the game was started before I start screen sharing, starting a screen share will cause the bug, and even if I'm not screen sharing but if I open another program such as discord it causes one drone to fall but not all of them. It seems like the issue is tied to my computer running other programs while the game is playing so I don't really know how to fix that."

I haven't had a chance to replicate the problem on my end and will continue to work with the student to trouble shoot, but it seemed like it could be helpful to ask folks in the forums if they have heard of similar problems related to screen sharing in the past.

Thanks!

I know! I'm a college professor who teaches on other topics as well, so most of my time is focused on other things. About once a year -- or once every 18 months -- I get the opportunity to immerse myself in C3 for the games class. It's always impressive to see how many new features have been rolled out during my absence from the community.

Thanks! I've been away from C3 for the past eighteen months and am excited about digging into this new functionality.

Hey Wacky Toaster -- Quick question: Using an invisible sprite to handle collisions for the player object is pretty easy to implement with an 'every tick' event. It's more complicated when we have multiple instances of an enemy object. What would you recommend as a strategy for keeping the collision box instance tethered to the enemy sprite instance? Should we use containers?

Ah! Fantastic. We're using an invisible sprite to handle collisions with player, so it's easy enough to do the same thing with the enemies. Thank you!

Thanks, wackyToaster! I just fixed the permissions issue on that file so you should now be able to view it.

A student in my games class is implementing a basic platform game following the same basic guidelines that are at the core of the official C3 tutorial for this type of game. (The only difference is that we're using sprites to create the environment rather than using tile maps for the environment.)

Enemy movement is handled by simulating platform controls and using collision with an invisible barrier to reverse the direction.

This is mostly working but the enemy is falling through the island when it reverses direction. Everything is fine when we make the terrain 'solid' instead of 'jump-through,' but we want to have jump through functionality.

The link to her C3P is:

trinitycommdepartment.com/~adelwich/temp/falling-through-jumpthru.c3p

Thank you, everyone. This is exactly what I needed to know!

Thanks, Newt! You mentioned that Tiled BG is better for areas with texture and Tilemap is better for lots of platforms, roads and buildings. Is the only noticeable difference in the creation phase when the developer is designing the layout? Or are there also differences related to code and ease of collision detection?

I use Construct 3 in an undergraduate communication course focused on game design and criticism. Once students understand the basics of the application, their first game design assignment asks them to create their own platform game.

In the past, following the recommendations of the original Construct 3 tutorial, I have encouraged students to create islands, ladders, and other elements of the game environment by loading a tile sheet with environmental elements into a single sprite. Each environmental object is a different frame of the sprite, the speed of the animation is set to zero, and students design the environment by dragging sprite instances around the layout and selecting frames accordingly.

However, I noticed that the most recent platformer tutorial on the Construct site suggests using the tilemap object instead of using sprite instances. If this is the preferred workflow, I will encourage my students to use this approach, but I'm wondering what others think about this.

What are the advantages or disadvantages of using tilemaps to create the environment in a platform game? Is it just a case of "six of one, half dozen the other?" Or are there clear advantages to one approach?