Fengist's Recent Forum Activity

  • We can do all necessary ui elements already via events, they're just super annoying to put together.

    I don't think we should be trying to get Scirra to implement their own versions of gui parts however. The existing forms serve as an example of why. They get the basic job done, but are terrible to customise.

    Its likely the same will happen to any other elements made by someone else. Those types of things will never be a perfect fit for everything.

    I think ideally we need to have some sort of push to get a bunch of different plugs made by a bunch of different third party developers to fill that need.

    Construct has been around for years. And while I did see one plugin attempt to make scrollboxes, it was pretty limited. Most IDE's give at least a basic scrollbox that can be customized by the dev. Construct has nothing like that and you can't wait for the community to give away for free what should be a basic control. As I stated in a previous post, I no longer do free work that benefits some other company's bottom line. It's unfortunate, but I like to eat too.

    But this is getting way off topic and needs it's own discussion. The point is, C3 has the potential for an indy dev to make a living. The biggest hurdle is that any solo dev is going to have to learn how to switch hats between a mortarboard, a beret, a bowler, a baseball cap and a host of others, in order to be successful regardless of the engine used.

    *edit

    Oh and regarding customization of basic controls. It's a lot easier with this plugin:

    CSS Inject: construct.net/en/make-games/addons/166/inject-css

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  • With the future of Construct being very open now that 3's runtime has surpassed 2's, I'm personally optimistic for a shift from game engine to "experience engine" that truly embraces HTML5+.

    This is real blue sky optimism, but would open the engine up in ways suggested above.

    As an aside, Ashley and Tom recently hinted on a great game dev podcast that there was possibly a change coming to C3 this year that would reinvent how developers use the product.

    One of the problems with C3 is that Ashley and Tom have always focused on the 2D aspect of the engine. They assume that platformers and other retro style games is what C3 should do. While those games do sell on the market, C3 can and could do a lot more. For example, in C2 I wrote teleprompter software for Android devices. While it did work and work well, Google kinda screwed me over on placement and I never could get them to fix it, thus, it never sold. But, it was a concept to prove, at least to me, that Construct could build working apps and not just games.

    Point is, Construct can handle multiple genres of games including HTML5 browser games like Grepolis. The biggest problem to making those kinds of games in Construct is the woeful lack of controls. If for example, you wanted to create a scrolling list box of items, it becomes a nightmare to create and manage. In other IDE's like C# and Delphi, they're easy drag and drop items. Even Unity has a host of plugins developed to make a listbox an easy thing.

    With those form type elements, C3 could be a lot more than just be a game engine.

  • In game ads work only with Flash games, which is basically useless these days.

    Since web site ads are basically html, something could be worked out to add them to Construct games.

    You can do it right now if you use iFrame to display them, but there should be a better solution.

    And they do have separate mobile ads I think, you do not get access to those unless you sign up specifically for them.

    I don't know if this would work but there is a plugin HTML Element: construct.net/en/make-games/addons/190/html-element

    This plugin essentially allows chunks HTML5 to be incorporated into C3 with full JS and CSS without having to pull in a full page in an iframe. One of the cool features is, you can use JS onclick events to call CS functions and pass parameters. At present I have a working HTML 5 menu (even with mouse-over events) that easily switches C3 layouts.

    I'm guessing that with some PHP backend and Ajax calls that pretty much any HTML can be integrated with C3, including advertisements.

  • Kinda curious if anyone has had any luck with Patreon, or similar services.

    Seems like it might be better than Kickstarter, or Gofundme.

    Especially if supporters are giving feedback.

    I tried this and I have lost all faith in humans. Once upon a time, I modded for a game. Over the years, I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours writing code in C#, plugging all that into Unity, creating 3D models, texturing, making videos, etc. Over 100,000 downloads of just one mod which was always in the top 30 out of 2,100+ mods in popularity. Thousands of downloads of other mods for the same game. All of the forum posts for the mod were linked to a Patreon account and the forum thread for the big mod had well over 100,000 views.

    My donations? $1.00 in Patreon + around $50.00 in PayPal donations.

    I've stopped modding because I'm of the opinion now that if you can't or don't somehow twist people's arm into 'donating' they won't. They'll go out and chuck $5.00 into a really crappy cup of coffee. Donate a stinking $1 willingly? Well yes, there are some games that have succeeded at that. They're few and far between. I'm personally not going to be that stupid any more. If I invest my time and energy creating entertainment for someone else (especially when it benefits another game company's bottom line) I expect to be compensated with more than just someone clicking a stoopid like button on a forum.

    My next attempt will be most likely a freemium model.

    (Can you tell I'm a tad salty about the topic of people donating for entertainment?)

    <--- the like button is there. Feel free to click it on these forums as I'm not selling anything yet.

  • And there's one more comment that needs to be made when considering writing any software, game or otherwise, profitable or not, and this is from someone who has a somewhat successful shareware product on the market (written in Delphi).

    Creating any piece of software to do what you want is relatively easy.

    Creating a piece of software that's idiot proof is almost impossible.

    In working on my next creation I've spent weeks on just the login and registration process trying to consider all of the things people can possibly put in text boxes that would cause issues. Don't ever assume that the end user will use the software exactly as you expect, because they won't.

  • As I see it, making a living off creating any game using any engine (C3, Unreal, Unity, etc.) is entirely possible, even as a solo indy dev. I'm aware of one game that is pure HTML that the owner was claiming to make $750 a month off Google advertisements alone.

    Whether it's possible or not isn't the question. The proper question is HOW to make a living off any game.

    There are a number of approaches as to how to earn a living. Dwarf Forest went for years with two brothers making a living off of crowdfunding alone. It's now been accepted into Steam and will likely rocket beyond it's previous income.

    Placing your game on any host type service (Google Play, Steam, Epic, etc.) is probably a good idea but then, you get buried in the thousands of other games in those services. The two brothers from Dwarf Forest focused on one game for years and constantly added to and updated it before going for the Steam platform. Their approach was one product focused on one specific segment of the market.

    Other gaming companies go for the shotgun approach. Lots and lots of games that are quick and easy to develop with each one making a small income. Or, one game with lots of players making small incomes off of some of them. The CEO of World of Tanks once said he'd rather have a million players occasionally paying a few dollars rather than a hundred players paying every month. This strategy created a huge player-base that helped him advertise the game. The thing you have to worry about there is an old sales adage: A happy customer will tell a friend, an unhappy customer will tell 10 friends.

    In the world of gaming you either make loads of cheap, pink bubble gum and sell tons of it it for a few pennies each or, you make designer bubble gum in a pretty package and sell a lot less for a lot more.

    So, the first decision is, a focused approach to a limited market making money off all of them (subscriptions) or, a broad approach to a wide market and making a few bucks off of some of them (in game purchases).

    Regardless of how you make money, the key to any games success is multi-fold. Foremost, you need a game that entertains people. Most game dev's create a game for their own liking. What they forget is they aren't in the game-making business, they're in the entertainment business. You game needs to be entertaining. If it's not fun, people won't keep playing it.

    Nextly, it needs to be engaging. You don't want people completing the game in a few hours. They'll consider themselves to have won and will quickly look for another game to beat. The longer you entertain people, the better the odds of you earning an income.

    The BIGGEST key to any games success is marketing. And I don't just mean buying ads on Google. By that I mean getting the word out and in the proper channels. For example. Albion Online just went free to play. If you look at the Steam charts prior to f2p it had around 400-600 players. Two days after going f2p it had 10,000 players. Their marketing team blasted out press releases to all of the major game review sites prior to going f2p and many of them picked up on that story. As a result, Google News grabbed those stories and showed those news articles to people who are interested in gaming (like me). As a result, I saw it and I decided to go play (and subscribe for a month). There are gobs of ways to market your game for free. Journalists who write stories about gaming love it when their job is made easy by press releases. It means they don't have to go digging for a story.

    If you want your game to succeed you need to promote it. Mark Twain once said that the perfect place for a spider to build a web is in the doorway of a business that doesn't advertise. In today's flooded game market, that's even more true. It does no good to create a game if nobody knows that it exists.

    So, as I see it, those are a few of the things you have to consider when creating a game and making it profitable. It's more than just writing code. Construct is a great gaming engine with lots of possibilities and flexibility and the potential to make a living is definitely there. And the ability to create entertaining, captivating games is there.

    Creating the game though is only part of the equation.

  • Did you actually add parameters to the function ? This is an additionnal step that you did not have to do before. Right-click on the Function event, and "Add parameter".

    That was what I was missing. Wow, ok. Thanks.

  • Inside your function event, you'll have access to your parameters as expressions directly under System > Global & Local variables.

    I still don't get it. That's what I was doing before.

    If inside the function I select system.setvalue, in the variable list I get all of my global vars which I'd expect. But in the value, there's no way I see to add in either function.param(0) or anything with the function name.

    With the old way, I could set a global to function.param(0). Now, function doesn't appear in the list nor does the function name appear in the list and gives an error when trying to set it.

    What am I not seeing here???

  • New function's parameters are treated as local variables.

    I don't get it, you mean an instance variable? How do you get the value of one?

  • Prior to the new functions I could use System and set a global variable to the Function.Param(0).

    Now, I can't.

    So what's the new method for getting the parameter of a called function???

  • Not sure if he's still around but years ago there was a guy claiming to be making a living off it. His methods were a bit 'dodgy' which is why I never looked into them.

    Basically, he would buy C2 games off of some trading website for little or nothing, reskin them and then, resell them on the same site. He also wrote a book on how to do it and was trying to sell it here on the forums.

    Whether that worked and was profitable or not is another question.

  • So far, I haven't run into any issues with the HTML Element. If you have found bugs I know that less than a month ago I know that el3um4s was responding to issues on the GitHub page. Try reporting them.

    My forte is PHP. I can read JS and if someone beats me severely I can probably write code in JS so I can't comment on React/Preact.

    I like your idea of using a div to hide the content. I'v been trying to come up with a way to make a message box work well. That might do.

    As for positioning, yea. Construct may work well when resizing games but I personally hate the letterbox black bars on the sides. I've already got absolute positioning in place with a function and in all of the layout startup.

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Fengist

Member since 6 Nov, 2015

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