Glad you had fun. My team used Unity for the jam and that was not an enjoyable experience. The main programmer did a fantastic job, but we were so limited on the game mechanics because of how much straight coding it all required.
Thanks! Sorry to hear that you didn't enjoy the Unity development experience. We had several teams work in it and I personally feel that the engine got in the way of some of those projects - incompletion and all that. I think that even if I had managed to get it to run on my machine - I'd not have had the fortune of picking it up sufficiently as to churn out anything basic.
This is something that can create issues, I agree. There isn't a github (or other sharing/merging) link to game files. However, people can work on behaviors and "export" them. Stencyl saves the behavior as a .png file. You can then "import resource" the .png file on another computer or into another project. Local attributes (the blue ones) are transferred in. The global attributes (purple ones) will only transfer if you have the same attributes on both project files. For instance, if you make a .stencyl file with all of your global game attributes, you can share that on all systems. Every .png export would then have the same purple attributes transferring.
That is certainly very useful to know. I am surprised. The behaviour is saved as an image file? Curious yet intriguing.
You can do that when you import a picture. Select the file and then set the number of columns/rows you want to split it up into. It works best if all images are evenly space out.
I am not sure if I explained myself well there. I am talking about a single image, say 320 x 320 pixels in size, mapped to a master animation file (kind of like tilesets) and then, when adding an animation, click on (or even drag across) the desired frame(s) and add accordingly, without needing to reload the image concerned.
In the end I settled for slicing the png into seperate single-row, multi-column animations and it worked out well enough. :c)
Tiles seem to always go to the back of layers - so in that case, yes have a second layer.
Thanks for the clarification. :c) Now that I mention it, it would also have been nice to be able to go over the main tileset that I used, drag across an entire section of it and designate to animate. Then simply select an identically proportioned second section on the same tileset and thats frame two for the first selection, and if need be a 3rd selection for a 3rd, etc. It was a bit tedious separating the large png's animated sections into small files to facilitate the tile-by-tile animation process.
With actors, you can have one layer and use "move to front of layer"
Collision detection can be found with Run>Debug Drawing.
Create a new actor group for bullets and you can dictate what they collide with. If you only want to focus on tiles, then you need to use the Tile API. You can check for "get tileID at row: column". This way you can specific which ones the bullet will hit.
That is certainly very useful to know and I thank you for taking the time to address these difficulties encountered here. :c)
I think it will prove a fruitful exercise to revisit the ggj game and simply sort out the bugs without adding features. Don't want to get too bogged down.
As with any engine, you would need to set up your attributes/variables to check for these things. No engine/language automatically knows when players are dead without being told. All you would really need is two boolean attributes. Set one to true when player1 dies and set two to true when player2 dies. If both one and two are true, go back to title.
Thank you. I trust that these would need to be game attributes rather than local attributes.
This isn't an engine related point. If you want "smart" AI and different customizations, you will probably need to program it yourself.
This is definitely a fair point and I would like to hasten to add that it is not my wish to have everything done for me.
mp3 is only for flash. ogg is for desktop and mobile. I have Audacity (works on mac and pc, maybe linux too) on my systems. It can quickly export the same file to mp3 or ogg depending on what is needed.
I was planning (but never got around to using) Anvil Studio for mid creation. Will look into Audacity. Thanks.
For size, if you go into settings, you can uncheck 4x, 3x, 2x resolutions. This will decrease the file size by 80%. Flash running slow is might likely from too many "always updating" events happening. You can create boolean (true/false) attributes to shut off the updating when it is not needed. Another cause of lag is collisions. If things are constantly colliding even when not needed, it will drag down the system.
Another thing that may have contributed. Earlier on in the jam, on the suggestion of a member of another team I initially went for 1600 x 900 screen size and yet on resizing down after realizing the unsuitability to my system the scene previews seemed to remain at the larger size.
The tip to remove 4x,3x and 2x resolutions sounds like an excellent suggestion and I will do so from now on.
Interestingly I did already notice a big performance drop difference betwen making events 'on creation or 'always updating' so thank you also for solidifying my understanding there. Also the tips about collision.
In short, thank you for all the feedback. You are awesome. :c)