Ahhh. Judging by this, programming in C2 would produce a very slow AI. Hmm. Thanks for that.

If it's really that complicated though, then how come there are so many strategy game apps with CPU on the various app stores? I mean, I downloaded an app with Latrunculi, Hnefetafl, and 9 Men's Morris all with computer AI, all apparently made by a one man team. Why couldn't it be done easily since it clearly has been done before? Like I said, I don't want to build an amazing chess engine. I just want a game that'll play.

Hey there! Thanks for that. This is a very interesting way to look at it. I'm sure this is going to be useful.

I'm starting smaller. A simple game with two pawns on either side that capture diagonally-adjacent pieces but can move orthogonally in 4 directions by one tile. To be honest, I don't want to program chess. I just thought that might be the "road most oft traveled" so that's what I asked. And for my purposes, thinking one turn ahead is enough. I'm not trying to make a grandmaster chess engine. I just want a game prototype I'm working on to play with me.

Yes, the more I read on it the more unlikely it seems that I'll be able to figure this out in any kind of timely manner... I guess I just figured there are so many apps out there different abstract board games that there must be a straight path to it by now since others have done most of the work. I'm not sure I'm ready to give up on this yet. It seems that learning how to do it would probably be good for my programming knowledge in the long run, even if it takes a long time. I'm seeing some books written on the topic, a couple beginner guides online that aren't much help...

Anyway, if anyone knows something I don't, let me know.

What exactly do you mean? I'm sure that programming the AI will be hard, but I cannot imagine that it couldn't be done in Construct 2. Difficult is fine. I'm willing to learn. If it is impossible, I'd love to hear from Ashley or a few other veterans before I am willing to write it off completely.

It strikes me that it might be best to make a very simple example capx before jumping into a full game. Here's what I'm thinking: we'll make this educational for the community!

I'll make a miniature version of something like checkers. Then, we'll try to figure out how to make a CPU player. We can use this thread to bounce ideas around and I'll update it frequently with my example. Hopefully in the end we'll get a nice little example file that maybe could be included in later versions of C2 which will show how to program an abstract strategy board game and computer AI.

I'll get to work right now.

Is there anyone who is working on or had done a tutorial on this? I'm not really programming "chess", but I would like to learn how to because it opens up a lot of options for prototyping strategy games on my own.

The way I imagine it is that you store a copy of the board in a 2D array. The values that can be on a spot in the array would be titles for the various pieces to let the computer player, which reads the array to understand the board, know which spaces are occupied and by what.

OK, so far so good. From there, though, you need to get the computer to understand the legal moves. OK, I think I can do that. It'll take some work, but it's just a matter of having a given piece selected and then changing its value on the array... But then there's the issue of having the computer evaluate many possible decisions. That's where I wouldn't know where to start.

Is there anyone who could break it down for me? It'd be awesome if there were already a capx or a tutorial on the topic but it seems very unlikely. Help if you can! Thanks!

It might be best to start on Steam. Someone created a group that features all the games on Steam at the moment which use Construct 2. Angvik, Our Darker Purpose are memorable ones.

I thought it was pretty clear that those stock photos were supposed to be samples of OUR customers should we use TideKit. I said as much in the first couple comments. I was also shocked when people seemed to willfully misread and interpret it as being "fake testimonials". Sometimes people just want to be skeptics and poo-pooers about everything. Let this be a lesson to all of us, then.

And despite TideSDK being a relatively easy to research thing, people here were still determined to call this a fraud and a scam. To be fair, it still could be, but man, it seems to me that this guy, who gave us his name and has an active Twitter account for his business, and clearly has a reputation, has come here and professionally explained things very well for us. It seems that Mr. Pratt is invested in this project at the very least. I'm not saying I'm buying TideKit, but I would be a bit more cautious before I rush to call it fraudulent given that it is easily researched that TideSDK is a thing: http://www.tidesdk.org/.

Here you can also see David Pratt's name mentioned as their "fearless leader": http://www.tidesdk.org/blog/2012/09/29/ ... ct-update/

Going on to TideKit's website, you can see that David Pratt (as fairwinds, which was his alias on TideSDK and twitter) is indeed the project leader of both TideKit and TideSDK.

I for one am curious to see if TideKit will have any relevance to C2. That's what we should really be focusing on from here on out. It's clear that TideKit is a thing, although we don't know exactly how powerful or applicable it will be to us. At the very least, I think we can put some of our skepticism aside.

Can someone make a video comparing ejecta to cocoonjs?

I like the way this thread began. Let's return to that.

I've got experience with Stencyl Free, Construct 2 Personal Edition, Clickteam Fusion 2.5 Personal Edition, Game Maker Studio Professional, GameSalad, and (the very underrated) Game Develop. They all have their advantages and weak points. That said, C2 has become my go-to engine for most purposes because I find that the things I want to do which I cannot do are few and far between, and the things I want to do and can do are very easy to figure out without resorting to a tutorial. In the other engines, if I want to try something new, that usually means looking things up and spending a great deal of time working out the theory behind it, but C2, it's all very intuitive for me, personally. Add that to the fact that C2 definitely receives the most meaningful and frequent updates and has one of the more helpful communities, and you've got a winner.

I actually take notice when someone rants about why they like their engine better than another though. Despite those posts often being misguided and sometimes just very biased and wrong, it's fascinating to see what people consider to be the strong points of an engine. For example, I generally shy away from GameSalad, but when I find people who still swear by it, I can't help but wonder what they see that I don't. I'd really love to hear what other people think about C2's strengths when compared to other engines, and its weaknesses, too.

People like to say lack of direct scripting is a weakness for C2, but those are all people who don't use C2. If they did, they'd know about plugins, custom behaviors, etc.

Construct 2 Game Jam on Newgrounds: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1364625

May 1st to June 15th