Show HN: Colors – Experimenting with Construct 2 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Colors – Experimenting with Construct 2

sleepysort.github.io

45 pointssleepysort41 comments

I'm the developer of Construct 2 - it's our startup (www.scirra.com). We're YC rejects :) Nice to see it pop up on HN!

Hi Ashley! I've seen you around on the Scirra forums; nice to meet you! Thanks for all the great work!

Hi Ashley, I've only just started out playing with Construct 2 and I have to say it is fantastic. I recently used Scratch as a teaching tool and this seems like a great next step.

It also seems like a great tool for quickly making Ludum Dare games. Thanks.

Looks neat, but I would play with nicer palette. Also the hardness is increasing hyperbolically so after those small red dots appears it's almost impossible to survive.

The color palette was pretty random haha; if you have a better color scheme to recommend, I'd love to see it! And I'm currently trying to find a good balance for size and speed such that the game is very challenging, but not impossible.

Whichever color scheme you choose, make sure it works for colorblind folks too! I'm not colorblind myself, but I know it's a good source of frustration for them.

I don't think that is possible, given how many different colors this generates.

As the colors are purely for aesthetic purposes, this shouldn't be too much of an issue. As long as it is pleasing to the eye for them!

I guess this is true, as long as the colors do appear differently to them.

I don't think the colors are for aesthetic purposes. They describe meaning for how large and fast the objects are.

Checkout this: http://clrs.cc/

and try not to use similar colors after each other.

Here use this - http://llllll.li/randomColor/

The resulting balls always travel at a 45 degree angle from the direction of the shot. So shooting diagonally should keep all resulting balls travelling up-down or left-right. This would keep all balls in a rough cross shape on the playing field.

Stay out of this area and you will be able to live forever and easily beat the game.

In practice this is really hard to achieve since only a small deviation will cause some of the ever increasing number of balls to hit you anyways.

Nice job picking up on the nuances of the game :) and as you said, much easier said than done.

It freezes for me after about 5 seconds in (Chrome 36.0.1985.143)

Huh. Interesting. Do the controls freeze or the game itself? I'm not sure what would cause that; the game was developed on a proprietary HTML5/JS engine.

There's an error:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'qb' of undefined c2runtime.js:105 g.Jq c2runtime.js:105 g.qb c2runtime.js:102 si

I wish I could make sense of that error for you haha...

Check your browser addons and try disabling them - some clunky addons clobber Javascript that the Construct 2 engine uses and breaks it.

Tried in incognito mode where everything is disabled. Still, it freezes with the same error. (Windows 8.0, Chrome Version 36.0.1985.143 m)

Huh, odd... I'm afraid to investigate further you'd have to ask the game author to trial a non-minified version with you. I'd be keen to find out the cause so if there's an issue in Construct 2 we can fix it.

Actually I did some sleuthing from the minified code and found where it corresponds to in our engine. It's just calling a tick function on one of the behaviors, and I guess from the error report it's calling a function on an array with an empty element in it. No idea how that could fail or why it would only happen on one system and not another, this is probably only Javascript logic. Maybe the author is using an old version of C2, or a broken third party plugin... or you have a buggy extension that runs in incognito mode?! I still want to get to the bottom of it, maybe if you head over to our forum at www.scirra.com/forum and post there we can dive deeper.

To clarify, I'm using C2r178, and no third party plugins.

If you want to try to resolve this, feel free to contact me via email (shawnsmlee at gmail); the code/capx project file is also on my github, so if you would like to try making sense of it yourself, you're more than welcome!

Construct 2 is becoming a better and better game engine. Good to see it getting some love on HN

I'm thinking about also adding co-operative multiplayer functionality; what are your guys' thoughts?

Sounds fun and I would definitely play with my friends :)

Add touch controls for mobile devices if possible (check PewPew for a similar movement mechanic) and you got yourself a pretty fun mobile game. I'm not sure if mobile browsers would be up to the task though, just throwing random ideas.

Does Construct2 include networking and lag compensation? It's hard to achieve smooth gameplay over the internet, especially for fast-paced games like this one. Check [1] for a great resource on networking.

I have some experience on game networking. Feel free to contact me at (el + my HN username) at gmail if you need some help.

[1] http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/

I'm not sure about lag compensation, but the good folks over at scirra added multiplayer functionality via WebRTC, which allows for peer-hosted games. I'll look into adding touch controls and maybe get it out to Android soon!

Thank you for the offer! I'll be sure to consult you if I have any questions!

Yes, Construct 2 supports multiplayer over WebRTC DataChannels with built-in interpolation, lag compensation, input prediction and more: https://www.scirra.com/manual/174/multiplayer

Looks fun, but the red balls are frustratingly hard to hit.

You should make it go fullscreen, I keep clicking my bookmarks and taskbar!

EDIT: I might've found a bug. One of the red balls escaped the game field near the top-left corner while moving in a horizontal trajectory.

Yeah I've seen/heard from folks that this happens; will fix sometime later today! Thanks!

I cannot shot using a regular tap on the trackpad. I need to hit really hard the surface to shot, but I can get considerably fire speed using the physical button..

Does it seem that staying in the corner is a good strategy?

Maybe if the canvas wrapped it would make moving around more rewarding, strategically.

I introduced the score multipliers (hitting the same color twice) to discourage staying in one spot the whole game, but I guess it is still a prevailing strategy. That's a great idea! Would both the player and the balls wrap around, or just one of them? Also, what are your thoughts on having the entire playing field in your vision, or having a locked camera on a much larger field?

The strategy for getting rid of red balls is to just wait until you get a lag spike and they go out of screen (forever).

Wow, almost as smooth as Flash! I think HTML5 could be easily used for casual games in about 5 years.

check mine out: https://rawgit.com/mickeysanchez/battle_for_the_colorverse/c...

Bravo, thanks for ruining my productivity today.

I must be on the wrong browser...all I see is "C o o"

Are you using a modern browser with JS enabled?

EDIT: I'm a derp; your JavaScript must have been enabled since it (partially) rendered the menu screen. Check your plugins, see if there's anything that might conflict with the Construct 2 engine.

I'm running Firefox (32 I think?). I do have Ghostery running, but I tried disabling that thinking it was perhaps blocking something.

Could be the age of my laptop, though, I suppose.

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