Game Construction:

Before starting my level I decided to check and make sure that my character's various animations for each of their mechanics worked correctly. The walk cycle alone has 12 frames, (excessive I know but I wanted a smooth realistic run cycle so sue me). I knew there was a possibility of things acting out or playing up, simply because the normal amount of frames for various mechanics is normally 2 - 3.

Everything appeared fine until I added the 'scroll to' behavior to my character, as soon as that was selected, I saw in the game preview that whenever my character changed from one mechanic to another (e.g. running to idle, running to jumping). The ground below would visibly jitter and shake up and down. Which is not the look I was going for. It was quite disorientating and as a game player, I would have found it incredibly frustrating, especially since this game is going to be focused on jumping and landing on specific tricky spots, the last thing I want to add to the equation is a shaky ground to try and land on.

After re-watching Hossein's (my game studio lecturer) tutorials I realised this was happening because I'd forgotten to select 'unbounded scrolling' in my game set up options. Once that was selected, the ground no longer shook weirdly and everything behaved properly (thank goodness because I'd spent a good half day on google trying to figure out what the problem was and was beginning to panic hahaha).

Character controls so far - I'll add the attack mode once I've introduced the enemies into the game level so I can test it straight away for any glitches or problems.

Applying solid ground to my level for my character to run across. My background is all on one layer, and instead of separating the silhouettes and making them all completely solid (meaning my character would only be able to jump on top of them, rather then run through the archways of the bridge etc etc) which is no fun. I decided adding an invisible ground layer on top of the silhouette background was more effective. I was able to have far more control as to exactly where I wanted things to be solid and others to be empty and have the character pass through them.

Entire level with solid ground mapped out.

Testing for any glitches/ gaps in game preview.

Hiding all the solid ground layer by making their opacity 0% - therefore the player just assumes all the silhouette parts of the game are solid - which is what I want.

So far game construction is going well. I still need to add coins, point and health scoring bars, as well as my enemies which will be patrolling the rooftops. I also need to create my START, GAME CONTROLS, YOU DIED, LEVEL COMPLETE pages. So I'm roughly halfway there - I have my level environment/solids all done, and most of my character mechanics working correctly, so now I just need to add everything else and get them all working together cohesively.

Tutorials used so far:

- Hossein's class recordings for Construct2 tutorials + class notes

- Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_EBoy4HQXI

- Construct Tutorials:

https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/253/how-to-make-a-platform-game/page-1#h2a1

https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/253/how-to-make-a-platform-game/page-2

#gameconstruction #construct2 #youtubetutorials #gamedesign #screenshots