Construct Classic was released in 2007. It was initially created as a hobby project by a group of students working in their spare time. However, the project was really buggy at first, with the team spotting many flaws in the design of Construct Classic, such as absence of support for platforms other than Windows. The team decided that supporting Construct Classic was not a good decision and decided to halt development in April 2013. The entire source code was published on SourceForge, and people can still freely access it if they want, although now there is no official support being provided. Construct 2 was already developed in 2011 with major design changes in mind. One of the design changes proposed was to use HTML5 as the technology behind the tool instead of DirectX that was used by Construct Classic, which allowed the software to support lots of different platforms.
Construct 2 makes it easy for people to make 2D games, regardless of their background. It comes with a complete set of powerful features, has the ability to support multiple platforms and app stores, and possesses an easy-to-understand visual programming system. It is also extensible using a plugin system, with lots of plugins being developed by the community to extend the capabilities of Construct 2.
Learning Construct 2 will introduce you to Construct 2's interface and workflow, and at the end, it will provide you with the skills and knowledge you need to develop your own games, even if you don't know programming at all. This book will guide you through the features of Construct 2, and it uses Construct 2 to create features that are available in popular games, for example, physics, high scores, and AI.
Chapter 1, Downloading and Understanding Construct 2, introduces you to Construct 2. This chapter will make you familiar with the interface and terms that Construct 2 uses, as well as give you a quick overview of the event system.
Chapter 2, Creating Your First Game Design, will teach you what you need to know about game designing. We will start with the definition of a game, make challenges and rewards, and finally move on to create our game design document.
Chapter 3, Creating Diverse Player Experiences with a Flappy Bird Clone, will examine what makes Flappy Bird addictive and how we can attempt to make a similar experience. We will use a technique called procedural generation to create random objects.
Chapter 4, Making a Breakout Clone, will teach you how to modify gameplay elements. We will use instance variables to modify the state of game objects.
Chapter 5, Making a Platformer Game, will teach you about the physics engine inside Construct 2, how it behaves, and how you can use it to incorporate physics in your game objects.
Chapter 6, Creating a Space-shooter Game, will teach you how Construct 2 stores data locally and how to read this data in a game. In this chapter, we will create a leaderboard in our game to demonstrate it.
Chapter 7, Making a Battle Tank Game, will teach you about the basics of AI and how to make an enemy object with its own AI. We will make an AI that makes the enemies shoot at the player when they see the player.
Chapter 8, Debugging Your Game, will teach you about events that usually cause bugs and how to avoid them. Alongside this, we will use debugging features inside Construct 2.
Chapter 9, Mastering the Best Practices, will teach you about the best practices in game development in general and in Construct 2, revealing some techniques that developers use to make their game in an efficient way.
Chapter 10, Publishing Your Game, will teach you how to export your game to the Web, desktop, and mobile platforms.
In order to run the example code presented in this book, you will need an HTML5-compatible browser. Chrome is recommended, though any modern web browser will be sufficient, as they all have supported HTML5 specifications.
To experiment with the code yourself, you only need a Windows machine, as Construct 2 is a Windows-only software. Construct 2 provides virtually all you need to make your own game, from developing to debugging to publishing. The additional software that you might need is a graphics tool such as GIMP or Photoshop.
This book is for people who want to make their own games but do not have any skills or experience to do so. This book will guide people in creating their game without the need for previous programming knowledge. After reading this book, you will know, understand, and apply the techniques used in game development.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Construct 2 saves its project in a .capx format, which is just a ZIP file of a project."
A block of code is set as follows:
"playerScore1": 50 "playerScore2": 100 "playerScore3" 70 "playerScore4": 20 "playerScore5": 60
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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