Having one large layout with the entire city is much more difficult to do, but it is possible. So it's up to you what kind of experience you want the player to have.

Some things to consider if you want to do it the hard way and have the whole map on one giant layout:

1) This is more feasible if you have small / low resolution graphics (eg pixel art). You can get away with loading in more things if they are small and don't take up much memory.

2) You may be able to make use of render cells on some layers with a lot of static objects to cut down on the performance overhead.

3) You may be able to set up some sort of fancy optimisation systems such as saving the entire city grid in an array and repositioning objects to give the illusion of a vast city (eg. in reality there is only like 50 buildings but you keep shuffling them around behind the scenes whenever the player gets close to things so it looks like a huge location).

4) You can enable / disable groups of events when certain things are on screen or not. For example, you might have a group of events that makes a bus drive around the city: you could just disable those events if the bus is not on screen. This sort of thing helps make sure the player's computer isn't tied up thinking about things it doesn't need to be.

5) C3 has good memory management features that mean you can (eg.) unload an object's sprites from memory (which normally only happens when you exit a layout). This might be handy for certain things (eg. if the player collects the last powerup, you could unload the artwork for that item from memory since there is no need for it any more).

If all this sounds too technical, though - the much easier way to do it is just to build the city across multiple layouts with loading zones :)

Yes, you can export the whole Dictionary as a JSON string and put it in LocalStorage.

I guess you may or may not need to do this given that your JSON data is already saved in achievements.json? Not sure how your setup works :)

I don't believe it's possible to reference image points by name, only their index (maybe somebody will correct me).

However, there will certainly be an alternative way to do what you're trying to do. Since you have to manually place the image points yourself anyway, why not add 2 instance variables to the sprite and store the count for left / right image points there? You'll know yourself if you just added four, six, or whatever points to the image, so it's just a matter of writing it down somewhere you can retrieve it later.

I must admit to not being quite sure why you're trying to do this with image points anyway. Can you give any more information about what you're attempting to create? Perhaps we can find a better way to do it :)

Your post is worded slightly ambiguously - I'm not 100% sure if you're trying to put dictionary data in a JSON file or load a JSON file into a dictionary. I'm guessing it's the latter?

There's two parts to this: getting the contents of the file, and putting them into the dictionary.

To get the contents of achievements.json, you can use the AJAX plugin > Request achievements.json (tag "loadAchievements")

AJAX is asynchronous, meaning this request will take a small but indeterminate amount of time to complete. That means we have to test to find out when the data has been loaded and is ready to use.

AJAX > On "loadAchievements" completed: Dictionary > Load from JSON string AJAX.LastData

Note the Dictionary accepts JSON in the following format:

{"c2dictionary":true,"data":{"item1":"whatever","item2":0,etc}}

Right-click on the layout's name in the Project Toolbar and select "Duplicate".

Bear in mind that it'll use the same event sheet as the copied layout by default (I can't tell you how many times I've got myself in a pickle by forgetting that admittedly very simple and obvious fact!). 🙂

Uhhh, I guess my image disappeared for some reason??

https://hosthive.cc/web/crash.png

Here's a reupload to my own server.

You could give the slider an instance variable that stores the last value.

Eg. On start of level: Slider value is 0, set lastValue to 0 (or whatever)

Later,

If slider value != lastValue: play sound effect, set lastValue to slider value

This ensures that the slider just remembers what it was set to and plays the sound if the user changes it to anything else. 👍

Marketing is a pretty broad spectrum and our product spans such a wide range of use cases it's impossible for us to address them all. We're doing a lot in education right now which will be pretty invisible for the B2C market but we're making great progress there.

For B2C B2B markets we're not doing a whole lot of active marketing, we find it quite tricky. We experiment from time to time but nothing has really stuck. Regardless, we're growing slowly and steadily in both product usage and revenue so we're in a good place and are happy with how things are going.

Oh, yes - I have heard a lot of teachers and schools using Construct, that's true. I'm pleased to hear you guys are doing really well with that :D

As far as B2C goes, yeah, that is a tricky one...

I would think this sort of thing would be mostly a pull rather than push type of marketing project. If people have already decided they want to learn Unity or something then they'll go and do that. Perhaps it's the people who aren't sure which platform they want to use could be good targets.

For example, I was looking at SEO. Right now, results for queries like "easy game creation software" are horrible (top result is a blog that says you should learn Unreal or Unity, or something?? Not helpful at all).

Maybe there could be some opportunities to put Construct more strongly in front of people who are actively searching for non-scary game development platforms to try out. Whether search optimisation, social campaigns, paid ads or whatever - I guess you'd need to think about it. 🤔

Some number we're pretty proud of to illustrate:

• ~920k users tried C3 in 2020
• Avg 3.8 sessions per user
• 25 min avg session time
• 200k new projects created in C3 monthly
• 60k games exported monthly

Those are impressive numbers indeed! 920k users??? As in nearly a million? That's incredible. Makes it all the more mysterious that C3 isn't more of a household name.

mikehive put your info in your profile so I can check out your Steam games!

Ah, thanks for asking - I've added my website to my profile, both of my games are linked from there 🙂

The aim of the showcase is to prove Construct 3 is used in industry, is a useful tool to raise/make money, and to show successful games. I think it does a pretty good job of doing this for the time being. In all honesty, I don't think it needs any other content right now but this might of course change in the future.

Yeah, that's fair enough. Like I said, I understand. And I realise that a lot of games that look pretty good by themselves may not necessarily add anything worthwhile to a showcase (eg. you may find you have all the platformer examples you need, no matter how shiny...). I understand that game devs shouldn't take it personally if you don't feel inclined to add stuff to your showcase.

I guess more broadly I'm just generally curious about Scirra's plans in the long term. Construct could totally be the next Game Maker in terms of public recognition - imo it's a fantastic piece of software, and I'd love to see it get there. But it'd need a bit of a kick with marketing and brand awareness and whatnot because, as this thread and the linked article have highlighted, a lot of game devs still aren't aware of it. (Certainly from my experience of chatting with other game developers, when they ask me what I use, I always end up explaining what Construct is as they aren't familiar with it).

It seems like marketing in general isn't something you guys are strongly focused on right now - at least in terms of new strategies and such. Is that fair to say?

Sorry... just being a nosy marketing guy 😛 You can tell me to go away or just ignore me if I'm being a nuisance.

We've tried more concerted efforts in the past at promoting people's games, but the truth is it's extremely time consuming and with minimal benefit to the game author as we just don't have much punching weight here. Engagement from our audience for this sort of content is generally minimal.

That's a fair point, and I do appreciate that a lot of the time the things that people think will help their marketing don't do anything (retweets =/= sales, and all that). I understand where you're coming from.

I'd only add the following two thoughts:

1. "Punching weight" is relative. To a nobody dev with 12 Twitter follows, a signal boost from you guys could be a big encouragement and vote of confidence. It's not the same as getting written up in IGN or whatever, I agree, but it doesn't hurt to encourage creators who may be just starting out on their journey.

2. Iirc the main thing I've approached your team about in the past is adding my games to your website, as part of the "look at the cool things you can do with Construct" type galleries. My games have pretty unique art styles (and universally positive Steam reviews, cough cough just saying), so I thought it might be nice for you to showcase the diversity of Construct products on your site (while also providing a nice bit of encouragement for me, if not actual marketing "results"). I understand that retweeting and social-boosting every random Joe who bombards you with requests doesn't really do you any favours, but I must admit to being a little disappointed to be given a (polite) "go away we're not really interested" when trying to contribute something that might actually benefit you in a small way. Fair enough if you don't want new examples for your site, I guess.

Anyway, I got over it 😛 But it seems to me that a big part of making Construct a bigger part of the game dev consciousness is having a broad stable of awesome, creative, unique games to showcase. Surely?

With absolutely no disrespect intended to Aurelien Regard (I think his game looks amazing, actually) - your website's front page is covered in shots of The Next Penelope. That came out in 2015, haven't we got anything newer to show as the poster child of Construct?? He even made it with the previous generation of the software (C2). I would submit to you that your community of users have been extremely busy producing weird and wacky things over the past six years - why not feature somebody new?

They say that games sell consoles, and I think the same must be true of game creation software. People want to know: what can I make with this? What have people been able to do with Construct? The proof is always in the pudding, and all that.

Anyway, I'll stop waffling. I really do love Construct and I wish more people used it. I just can't help wondering why they don't.