There's always a way. Metal Gear Solid 1 and Tenchu on PS1 both had stealth, but no dynamic lighting. Sometimes both sound and line of sight can be enough if used right.

Well, I never did really introduce myself. Of course, I've only been here for a short while.

I'm Drew from West Virginia.

I recently decided to get into game making because it seemed like it would be a good fit for my skills. I majored in art in college, I play keyboard, and I am good with computers (though programming is my least favorite part), so it seemed like a field I would do well in.

I've already posted my art in the art thread. I hope to post a screenshot or two from my first major game soon. This project will probably take a few months. Most of that will be getting things set up and learning. Hopefully later I'll have C2 down and be proficient in everything I need to do so I can just concentrate on doing the work.

Of course, I figure I'll always be learning something new to better myself and make improvements.

So far, I've mainly been following tutorials and getting things set up. I set up Photoshop as best I could for pixel art, I have collected a ton of art and references. I have videos and gifs of video games for reference (such as animations). Right now, I'm just practicing and trying out some ideas. I already have my first major project started. I'm just easing into it slowly.

You should be hearing more from me soon once I get a bit more done on my game!

Please send me the capx at luciddce@brashmonkey.com and I can take a look. There are some playback issues fixed in the next version of the plugin so that may be it, or it may be a bug in the plugin or an issue with the events.

I started a new blank project as a test. I think the issue was that I resized the guy to make him smaller. That made the animation seem jerky. The animation was smoother when I left him full size.

Is it normal for animations to be jerky when they are smaller, or is the issue mainly with resizing Spriter animations in Construct 2?

I'm putting a double jump in my first game. I just think it offers more control, and it's fun. Bad air control can make or break a platformer. Although in some cases it might make it too easy, but my game is more combat focused anyway. After playing games like Castlevania: SOTN or Rouge Legacy, I find myself really liking double jumps.

Quick question, I was just experimenting. I imported the Grey Guy demo that you provided us into Construct 2, but when I play it back in Chrome, he looks jittery. The animation is just not as smooth as it looked when I opened the guy in Spriter itself. The game says it's playing at 60fps. Is this normal, or is there something affecting the animation to make it not play as smooth as it appeared in Spriter?

Thanks, I'll have a look at it today and see what happens.

Also, why is this forum so buggy? I have been denied making simple posts like "thanks for the help" in other threads because I didn't have "permission", and now I can't add the following line to my post above "oh, and both are pinned to a hitbox with platformer enabled." because all the sudden it says I can't post links or something. There are no links in my edit, so I'll just make a whole new post to say what would have taken one line. *sigh*

Anyway, thanks for the help to anyone who answers my question above.

Okay, so I set up an enemy to attack when I get close, and it worked. I thought I would try to give him an idle animation, but no matter what I do, the idle animation nullifies the attack animation.

Here is a screen shot. Note that I also just got Spriter, so I'm trying this with both a regular sprite enemy, and the new spriter object.

Enemy (red) and the myfirstattack Spriter thing are two different things. I'm trying to animate them both. Though I will remove the enemy once I get Spriter working. I have been using "enemy" to figure out a.i. and just got Spriter yesterday, so I'm still working on it.

That's just the part that I need help with. The full event sheet is too big to show, but it worked fine before. I just can't get it to work with an idle animation and an "attack on contact" animation. The enemy is set to attack when I touch it. It only works if I disable the idle animation.

I set the idle animation to play when the enemy is standing still. It plays the idle animation with the enemy.

With the idle animation enabled, the Spriter guy just stands there. If I remove the idle animation from the Spriter guy, he attacks non stop.

Obviously, there is something I am missing. Surely, it's something simple.

I need to get my pc set up to allow me to test on my cell phone. I may have to uninstall Zonealarm firewall. It may have been causing problems.

My main thing for now though is just at least making sure it runs on pc's pretty well. But to be safe, I'd like to at least test a little on mobile.

My phone is a Nokia Lumia 920.

I just got Spriter. It's hard to decide what to focus on when everyone keeps announcing updates.

I think I will go ahead and do my main character. I had planned to spend the rest of the month doing the rest of the characters in the game, and then next month doing the levels.

jayderyu, as far as not filling the background I have it set to "clear background: no" I don't know if that's what you meant or not.

Thanks, I'm going to do some experiments tonight and see what I can figure out. I'll report back soon.

The game will be similar to Castlevania. It will be combat focused and somewhat difficult, so I don't need huge levels. I just want to make them look good, and not find out that it won't run at all on cell phones. I mean, I guess releasing on Steam only or whatnot would be fine, but I'd like to have options.

I'm also looking into a program called Spriter to see if that would help optimize animations for characters.

Okay, so it seems that larger (but not too large) images are the way to go.

I am going to have multiple layers so I can get some parallax effects.

I wouldn't really need anything to fill the entire layout since there will be some variation.

Can we go by the numbers that Construct gives us? Like if it says it is using x amount of memory, can we know if we are safe or not?

I can make a game look nice, my main concern is just making sure it will run. I'm just trying to plan ahead a little bit.

I'm getting ready to build my first real level, so I thought it would be a good idea to figure out some do's and don'ts.

I've searched for this info on the forum, but most posts were of older versions, so I don't know what's changed. I also thought some answers were a bit vague, so I want to make sure I get things cleared up.

Let's assume that we are making a fairly large level, and we need to fill it up. Maybe we'll target a standard resolution of maybe 720p, but our layout needs to be big enough to provide a worthwhile level for a platformer, so at least maybe 3000 to 4000 px or more.

Now, we want the level to look as good as we can, but at the same time not need a supercomputer to run well. We might even want to put it on mobile platforms as well.

Here is a chart showing some ways to fill the level. The numbers are just placeholders for example purposes.

A: we could fill the entire level with a sky, maybe just use a single color and using a tiled background.

B: we could fill areas with single color tiled backgrounds that are a bit smaller

C: we could fill large to medium sized areas with fancy tiled background for areas we want detail

D: we could make a bunch of individual sprites to fill the areas

E: we could make a bunch of sprites but each one would use an animation frame (like the platformer tutorial I read on here).

F: we could use background tiles that are various sizes broken down into chunks and then placed side by side

G: we could use sprites that are various sizes broken down into chunks and then placed side by side

H: we could use moderate sized tiled backgrounds like 500px by 500px

I: we could use moderate sized sprites like 500px by 500px

So, I mean we have a lot of choices for what we use to fill out the level. On one hand, we can end up with a lot of objects if we use smaller sprites. On the other hand, we can have fewer objects but larger images to work with.

I figure we will use a combination of sizes. I just need to find out what the limitations are so I know what will break the game and make it run poorly.

I've read warnings about using too many objects and warnings about using too large objects. I'm trying to figure out where the best comprise is before I start working hard on detailed artwork.