thanks it's going well! I had a bit of a hiatus the last year, but I'm back to it. I haven't updated anything on the forums in a bit.. I probably will after the summer.

hey those shadows look awesome.. are those rendered in real-time? love the look of this game...

I just created a few more units, and added some other things. After I get a bit more done, I'll put up a new video. Probably in a few days.

looks awesome Drew! you should really team up with a coder... clearly your expertise is in modeling and animating, it's all very pro looking... not to say that you can't code.. I'm just saying add another person to help out will only make your game even better. There has be C# people in your area...

good luck! I'm trying to keep a eye on your progress.. but I'm not on any of the unity forums! I'll try to follow your YT channel!

LaurenceBedford no no! I wish!

artist is Mark Ferrari

The guy who did these exact pics (in the op) discusses how he did it and other stuff in this gdc video.

he is discussing how he used colour pallette cycling to animate the pics in question at about 6 minutes and that it's actually almost impossible to do with modern tools. it is really worth watching the whole vid if you are into pixel art

gdc video about the original pics posted.

https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0

8 bitish pixel art.

Link to original work now available through browser.

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

.

late seeing this..this is great..thanks for posting!

I just submitted my game for the Construct 3 Newgrounds game jam. It's called Three Seconds. You can check it out here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/693969

Let me know what you think, thanks a lot!

pretty good! I like it a lot.. nice sfx

it's a big game for C2, not necessarily as far as 2d games go.

I guess that's a subjective term. What do you consider a big game for C2?

Basically what I meant was that my laptop has a graphics card and a motherboard video (integrated HD). If I disable the graphics card and use the much less powerful integrated graphics from the motherboard the fps actually improves.

does your laptop run other hardware accelerated games well? I would try it out on a various computers if you can to help narrow the issue. if you send me a build I can try to run it on my system (it's a couple years old and very moderate desktop).

I have probably about 1000-1100 objects (600 are invisible menu items) and only a few (maybe 30-40) are on the screen at a time. None of them but the player has any behaviors (platform) and one tilemap that has solid. Layout is about 4500 x 2600.

generally speaking this should not be happening. I've seen enough C2 platformer games to know something weird is up with what you are trying to do. The fact that none of your objects except the player has a behavior and you've disabled all the events and still get the frame drop is very suspect.

btw this doesn't even sound like a large desktop game.

Ironically I've changed the node webkit from my powerful GPU to integrated intel HD graphics and I'm not getting ~60 fps as long as I don't maximize the window full screen.

I don't understand what you are saying here.

jobel - the largest image is 640 x 360 (only one of them - the BG). I have probably about 1000-1100 objects (600 are invisible menu items) and only a few (maybe 30-40) are on the screen at a time. None of them but the player has any behaviors (platform) and one tilemap that has solid. Layout is about 4500 x 2600.

It all depends on what your game is doing. I have far more objects and an unbound layout and my game runs at a steady 60fps. My game is a decent size, I have about 3500 events and the main layout also loads at least 10+ large sprites over 800x800, they are not always visible. The player character has around 48 frames of animation and currently it's a good 300x300px (downsized in-game).

The only time I had a frame drop issue, was when I didn't cap out one of my spawners. I had been creating too many objects that were never destroyed (only if the player was near them).

Not sure what to tell you, except that I've always tested gradual.. any time I add something new, I would check to make sure the game ran okay. When I had my one frame drop issue, I noticed it right away after I implemented it. So I knew I had a problem that I needed to deal with. Adding a cap system worked great, and the player never notices it.

I think you need to find exactly what is causing it. What are those non menu object doing? there's about 600 of them. Do they have lots of frames of animation? try eliminating a group and see what happens. As long as you can reproduce your frame drop, you can always find the culprit, just gotta do some investigative work...

jobel - true, but I've tested all of that (deleted most of my objects, turned off all effects, AND disabled code and collision checks) to no avail.

deleted most of your objects? of the objects you left have how big are your sprites? how many do you have? what behaviors do they use? what are they doing on the screen? you say your cpu is not taxed, so your fill rate has to be doing something taxing. How big is your layout?

Honestly I would LOVE for it to be my bad programming, but if I disable all of my code the fps doesn't really change much. Unless, however, disabling is different from actually deleting it.

Not only "bad coding" but misuse of budgeting graphics/effects/particles/objects/collisions/force texture or anything that has a behavior etc..

I am a full time Construct 2 freelancer and I've completed many projects for browser, desktop and mobiles. Apart of making games from scratch I also had many requests from my customers to finish/optimize their game.

After several years with C2 I can clearly say that the most common performance issue with C2 is not a GPU but the C2 developers (or I should rather say their code). Of course GPU, CPU, your machine and C2 itself also takes some part in the performance issues but the majority of issues I saw was the C2 code (I mean the events of C2 devs projects).

C2 is pretty much like JavaScript or PHP or any other language that is not very strict from architecture perspective. What I mean is that it is very easy to make a simple things with C2 (like in JS for instance) but it is really a big challenge to make a big projects the right way.

The problem is (as mentioned above) the architecture freedom. So while making a big game people tend to use the same coding approach as for small games and in the end they are lost in the messy code which is totally unoptimized as you don't really need to care for optimization in small projects.

With big projects it's different. There's much more code/events so much more operations for CPU and therefore you must use the best coding practices so each feature uses the least CPU as possible. And next to that you need to keep your code architecture very organized to not get lost in your big project (and that is also not very easy with C2).

It also depends on what you call a big project. I worked with projects made of several thousands of events and after optimization they worked well on majority of modern desktop devices. Still the bigger project, the bigger challenge.

So to wrap up, in my opinion it is possible to make a big project (not sure about a huge one) in C2 in a way to make it work very well, but it's not an easy task. Definietely not a task for a C2 newbie. It needs experience and deep understanding of how the memory managament works in C2, which conditions are the real triggers and which are fake triggers, what takes the most CPU, how to make workarounds for high CPU intensive parts etc. Without all this knowledge you will probably fail in making a big game in C2 as C2 is simply difficult for such projects.

From the other hand if you pick Unity or any other engine you also need to learn how to use it properly.

EDIT: Just a clarification as I received some PMs. Please note that I'm not saying that performance issues are not related to the C2 itself at all, I'm just saying that the most common issues comes from the bad coding.

I agree 100% with all of this...

Blaming the only ways to export games for poor performance is highly disingenuous, since they're the only way to export and sell C2 games. I can't even imagine the gaps in logic that allow someone to arrive at your performance comparison conclusions.

You've hitched Scirra's wagon to HTML5, and that's fine. But let's not pretend it's even close to a mature technology, from a software/development standpoint all the way through hardware support, for the creation of medium-large games. The performance simply isn't there, and you're flat-out wrong to suggest it's remotely close to performance of native with anything more than a very, very simple game with absolutely no bells & whistles.

This response seems pretty harsh. So you think Ashley is being purposefully deceitful in order to sell more product? If so, to what end?