Just an update: the full .capx to this game is now available in the Tutorials section!

Wave-Based Space Shooter With Asteroids And AI Enemies

In my opinion, modularity should be before multiplayer, and then maybe more users could put forth the work into community multiplayer efforts; that multiplayer will benefit far more from modularity if modularity is implemented first.

   

I don't know how you define "good" vs "great" but my game is going to take a few months to finish.

I don't know a single "great" game made solely by one person. There are numerous books, lectures, and philosophies out there that talk about why having someone who disagrees with you on certain points and forces you to compromise will most often result in both of you creating a finer end product.

I might be willing to work with someone if they were an advanced programmer. Then, I could concentrate on the art and music. Of course, there's still the issue of whether they would want to make the same kind of games that I do. I'll most likely work alone on my first project. After that, I'll either continue to work alone, or I'll see where the road leads me.

This is the problem mindset that seems to plague this forum.

For example, I have a huge interest in space shooters. In my teen years I played a lot of space games online, got involved in sci-fi game communities, and I know a lot about the player perspective. My first C2 project was even a space shooter you can play here (audio has issues on some browsers). But when I try to collaborate with someone on this forum on a space game, I can't shake the feeling that I'm the one trying to make the game more accessible while the guy I'm working with wants to keep the game narrow or go really deep on features X and Y while leaving the other game mechanics really shallow and making the game feel like a developer's favorite features/mechanics simulation that only like-minded people would enjoy.

Another issue is that people don't seem to want to learn together. They are willing to take on an experienced developer as long as that experienced developer is willing to do the things they want them to. Look at the "Help Wanted" forum's posts filled with people saying "We are seeking experienced C2 developers to join our team and help us make OUR game in exchange for profits we make later on." I'm not sure where the "if we have a team, we're going to make MY game and not a game the TEAM decides on," or where the "We're looking for people who are MORE EXPERIENCED in C2 than us to join our team" kind of mentality came from, but it's not healthy.

Why aren't there any posts in the Help Wanted section that look like:

"Absolute beginner to C2. Does someone want to learn with me? Let's make a small project together!"

OR

"Making a space sim. Have basic game functionality completed, now looking for volunteer team members who love space sims to help us turn this into something great!"

The main complaint in this thread is C2's lack of modularity..something Ashley is likely working on as we speak and has been promised numerous times. I mean..come on, man. It's pretty amazing what Ashley has accomplished almost entirely by himself in such a short time and C2's future looks promising.

The main complaint I am making concerns the "ideas for the future" that Ashley posted. He did a great job of prioritizing the debugger over other features after the poll results were clocked in, but now it seems like the next logical step that would benefit the community the most (modularity) is getting pushed back as a "long-term" thing.

The purpose of me starting this thread is to try to convince him to move it up, probably after the tilemaps feature since he's already made great progress with that.

do agree that there isn't much of a "middle ground" around here though. I blame the tutorials section. The thought of writing a full-blown tutorial is a huge turn off. We need a forum, like every other game engine has, for people to share example .capx's to show off, experiment with, improve on, and learn from. It's the best way!

Every C2 project I have worked on is open source. The .capx can be found in a "My Creations" thread I have posted. This doesn't seem to stop people from posting "How do I make a notification system?" and "How do I make a turn-based game?" in the "How do I?" forum despite the fact that I have already created a semi-working project and documented it quite thoroughly.

It could just be that we need an organized area on this website to share .capx files (along with a description showing what our .capx does) for others to draw from.

But I do think lack of collaboration is the worst part of C2 - most people I talk to here about it say "Nah, C2 is just for a designer and an artist.", which is really not good. By making it so easy to develop on C2 people think "I don't need anyone else now!" instead of "Wow, imagine what a team could do now!". Especially with Spriter (and hopefully soon Sprite Lamp), you can make some stunning games at a ridiculous speed.

This is a big issue for this community. Instead of combining like-minded people and making "great" games, each of us would rather retain full control and make "good" games. I understand people are naturally adverse to others who have differing opinions, but having someone who disagrees with you and forces you to compromise can be the difference between making a game that is so narrow in target audience that it fails to sell and a game that can hit the balance just right.

If we examine the community as a whole, the majority of people here fall into one of two categories:

• Experienced with C2, likely have programming background, likely to use C2 for independent games that are mostly self-funded and self-developed
• New to C2, no programming background, trying to create something small

So where's the middle ground? There really isn't one because there's no modularity and no sharing of code. The transition from absolute beginner to competent C2 user to advanced C2 expert just isn't there.

With a community codebase and module system that promotes sharing of events, a user could pick up the ropes to C2 through tutorials and then begin the transition to competent C2 user by utilizing the public codebase and figuring out how to get the modules working into their own games (which involves reading the modules to get a basic idea of how they work). If everyone is forced to start from scratch or do long forum searches to find event snippets, then everyone is basically starting from the ground up for each project, minus the expert users who have their own individual codebases to pull from due to having a vast amount of small projects under their belt.

It's for this reason that I think modularity needs to be pushed up on the to-do list.

As I approach the halfway point in my senior year in college, the question of "Where am I going to work?" is something that has been plaguing my mind lately. After long deliberation, I've decided to leave C2 and start learning Unity. Before I go, I would like to share my honest thoughts on C2, the community, and areas I think it can be improved upon.

Collaboration

C2 is very easy to use and understand. But when it comes to collaboration, there isn't much that allows groups to work together easily. Sure, you can copy objects and events from one project to another, but what C2 could really use is something that bridges the gap between writing custom plugins to import and copying events from project to project.

The C2 blog recently mentioned "Modules" as a long-term prospect. If I'm not mistaken, this means Scirra will eventually address this gap and have a "codebase" on their website that allows for sharing of events that handle certain tasks. This is something Unity is quite notorious for - a community built upon tons and tons of shared code so nobody has to tackle every problem from scratch.

C2 has made the process of starting simpler by providing built-in behaviors that address issues for a lot of game genres, but it fails to encourage collaboration and sharing of events (no Modules system) that Unity does. There's no question that C2 has a definite community of developers here, but the lack of collaboration support means the community is not fueled by expanding and sharing code but instead by solving "How do I?" problems that more or less contain mostly basic questions from users starting out in C2. In other words, it seems like the extent of this community's "general codebase" is stuck at the beginner level, whereas a codebase of some kind with events handling (and comments explaining) how to accomplish certain tasks would not only reduce the number of basic questions asked in the forums, but it would also lead to an increase in the number of complex games created and showcased in the Arcade.

tl;dr - Just like the debugger became top priority because it decreased development time and helps us fix our problems faster (giving us faster transition from game feature to game feature), pushing the Modules concept from long-term to short-term would also decrease development time and push the C2 community in a better direction.

Asset Store

There's hardly anything there right now. I think if you let users sell their content in the asset store (sprites, example game .capx files, etc.), then Scirra would not only earn more money off of asset store royalties, but the artists in the community would also have a place to publish their works (and subsequently more artists would likely come here and pick up C2).

One of the biggest issues I think C2 has right now is that there aren't many "serious good-looking games" being made with C2. There are plenty of exceptions, but when you compare the amount of good-looking games in development in Unity (which is far more complex than C2 and is also a 3D engine so the users are dealing with 3 dimensions and not 2) to the games being made with C2, there is a stark difference in art quality.

I realize C2 is amazingly easy to use, but the community base still seems to be scratching the surface. As I mentioned in the collaboration section, Unity has a large public codebase and assets in their store that let you start on a project and not have to work from the ground up. This is HUGE, because the community as a whole right now seems to be stuck in one place.

GameMaker, in the eyes of the public, has the issue of "nothing serious has ever been made with GameMaker." I hope this doesn't happen to C2.

tl;dr - The asset store should be more open to community input. By allowing users here to sell things on the asset store, Scirra would increase its income through sales royalties while also allowing artists and hobbyists to share their work for potential revenue.

Just my two cents. Feel free to discuss!

Kraudi, would you possibly be interested in looking for volunteers?

I'm a space game fan who is currently a bit sad due to hitting a wall in my board game project and looking for something new to work on in my spare time.

You can find my credentials here: http://www.scirra.com/forum/seeking-to-work-on-a-project-with-someone_topic82477.html

Shoot me a PM if you might be willing to take on another developer :)

Interesting... what was BoardGame supposed to do?

Run it and find out ;)

Be sure the Gameplay layout is selected though.

I've hit a dead end with my board game and think I'm going to infinitely postpone it at this point (sorry to everyone who was looking forward to it).

I am now seeking to work with someone on an interesting project, preferably something from scratch with someone who has decent experience with C2. It will be a learning opportunity mainly, so don't expect me to be able to meet firm deadlines.

Here's the C2 experience I have so far:

2D Space Shooter: Icarus Wave Attack (sorry about any audio issues on some browsers)

Incomplete Board Game (capx file): BoardGame.capx

To be honest, I really want to work on a space shooter again, hopefully something kind of like SPAZ:

[TUBE]j0nFeFYd_HA[/TUBE]

If you have decent experience and wouldn't mind taking on a partner, let me know. Please do share what projects you've created when posting :)

If you're talking about this:

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/d1eNOzs.png" border="0" />

Adding that line doesn't work. I think it's redundant anyway.

Title is somewhat confusing, but I'm not sure how else to describe my situation.

I have a state machine that fires functions based on the states of objects. The dilemma is that the functions fire for the first time an object changes state, but not necessarily the second.

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/uVetsh9.png" border="0">

In the above image, the first object to have the activity "action" will cause the "ClosestEnemy" function to trigger. The return value is stored as ComputerTarget.

Once that first object is done (and its activity = "finished"), the game selects the next available computer object and has it run through the states. Everything works fine until the computer object has the state "action," in which case the "ClosestEnemy" function does not get called for the second object.

Does anyone have an idea as to why this might be?

The .capx is quite complicated, but the issues all concern the Computer Turn group.

BoardGame.capx

Still looking!