Construct Game Development Beginners Guide: A guide to escalate beginners to intermediate game creators through teaching practical game creation using Scirra construct with this book and ebook.

1. Start a blank game project (similar to the one we created in Chapter 1, Our First Look at Construct), and give it the name MyPlatformer. Then enter your author name in the Creator box.

2. Next, add a sprite into the layout.

3. We're now going to need some player graphics. You can use Construct's Picture Editor to make these or use a painting program of your choice. For this game, the player is ball-shaped and rolls around the map. It has animation frames for falling, jumping, dying, and winning a level. See the following reference image (exact image size does not matter, as the player...

1. First, we'll create the grass background object. Once again, open the Insert object box. Instead of a sprite, insert a Tiled Background object from the group Game.

2. Now draw the image for your grass. It does not need a hotspot, as the hotspot of a tiled background is always in the top-left corner.

3. Now name it Grass, and move on to making another one called Dirt. Position them to form an initial platform underneath the player, as in the following screenshot:

4. Change the Width of the layout to 1000 and the Height of the layout to 800. Then, make the entire level by copy-and-pasting (or dragging from the Objects bar) the grass and dirt objects around the layout, as shown in the following screenshot. You can use Ctrl and the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out of the layout.

5. Finally, set the layout background...

1. Click on the player sprite and expand the Groups menu. Then expand the Attributes submenu. We can now tick the two boxes Solid and Centre view on me. The end result is shown in the following screenshot:

2. Now move on to give the Solid attribute to the grass and dirt tiled backgrounds.

3. To stop the player leaving the level, create a new tiled background called WorldBorder and place three of them: one for the bottom and two for the sides of the layout, as in the following screenshot. Tick Solid for these as well.

4. Finally, scroll down to the Properties menu (outside of Groups), and untick Transparent fill for the WorldBorder object and choose WebGreen as the Fill color. Notice in the following screenshot, the world border on the...

1. Select the player sprite, and scroll down the left-side menu to the Behaviors group. Then, click on Add in the New Behavior box. We now see the following screenshot:

2. Our player object now has the ability to move around using the arrow keys and jump using the Shift key. Run the game to see this in action.

3. Now we can look at the settings for the behavior in the left screen. Change the Jump Strength and Max floor speed values, as in the following screenshot, until they control how you would want them to:

4. Finally, if you'd like to change the controls of the game, bring up the game properties menu and scroll down to the Controls menu. Then use the drop-down boxes to choose keys for each movement, as in the following screenshot:

1. Open the left menu for our player again. Scroll down to the Private Variables group, and click on Add/Edit to get a window similar to the following screenshot:

2. Now click on the plus button and create a number named Score. Leave the value of it at 0 and click on OK. Then click on Done in the private variable manager screen.

3. To finish, make a global variable Lives. To do so, open the right menu, and in the project tab, right-click on the item Global variables and click on the context item Add global variable, as in the following screenshot, when it appears:

Set the value to 3 and click on...

1. First, we will need to add a new layer to the layout. To do this, open the Layers tab on the right-hand menu, and click on the upward pointing paper button to make a new top layer.

2. Layers can be modified similar to objects. Open the left menu and rename the text layer to HUD (Heads Up Display), and the other layer to Game.

3. In the layer properties for HUD, change the Scroll X Rate and Scroll Y Rate percentages to 0. This keeps all objects on the HUD layer in the same position on the screen while the game is running.

4. Now, make sure the HUD layer is highlighted, as shown in step 2. This means each object we make is created on that layer. Insert two new Text objects to the layout...

1. Add a new sprite to the Game layer, which will be the end goal, and place it at the end of your level. Name it Goal, and give it the Bounding box collisions mode.

2. Now put some sprites around your level named Hazard. They can be lava, saw blades, spikes, or any other contraption you can think of. However, this time they will keep Per Pixel collisions mode.

3. Now we are ready to switch to the Event Sheet Editor tab. Right-click while in the Event Sheet Editor, and click on Insert event in the context menu that appears.

4. Each object can have its own conditions, but for now we are going to create an Always condition from the menu opened by double-clicking on the System object. The System object is included in every game.

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