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. First, navigate your web browser to www.scirra.com. This is the home page of Construct Classic and Construct 2.

2. Click on the Make Games tab, and choose the subtab Construct Classic.

3. Next, scroll down and click on Download Construct Classic R1.2. This may change to newer versions of Construct Classic in future, but the link position will be the same. Click on the link to start your download.

4. After downloading the installer, double-click to start the installation process.

5. Click through the installer pages until finally presented with the option to begin installation.

6. After the installation, the Visual Studio runtime will be installed along with the latest version of DirectX (downloaded automatically).

7. The installation should now be complete, and Construct Classic is ready to load!

1. Open up Construct and click File | New | New Direct-X game. This menu option is shown in the following screenshot:

2. We now have a project. Click on the Application 1 node in the Project window. The display should now look similar to the following screenshot:

3. For this chapter, we're just going to change the Creator and the Name boxes. Go ahead and type your name into the Creator box and My Game into the Name box.

4. Now, we're going to test if the project works. Click on the Project ribbon button (shown in the following screenshot), and then click on the Run All button underneath it to start your game:

5. We now have the pop-up window, which looks similar to the following screenshot. It doesn't look like much, but this is the starting point we will use to find our way around the interface of Construct Classic. Click the x button to close the window.

1. Start a new blank game project as we learned earlier. We start the project in the Layout editor tab. By clicking the pin button on the Properties and Project boxes, they will minimize to the sides of the screen to provide more viewing area. It is also possible to resize these panels by holding the cursor over the edges of the boxes and clicking to drag their width. The following screenshot shows these buttons with arrows:

2. Now click on the Event Sheet Editor tab to reach the view shown in the following screenshot. Notice that the ribbon bar automatically switches to the Events tab to provide some quick options.

3. Now that we've visited both the event editor and layout editor, we can look at the boxes on the right side of the editor. We've already met the Properties box on the left-hand side, so now if the right box is minimized as shown in the previous screenshot, click on the pin button again to display it. You should see the following screenshot:

4. Clicking on the Animator tab will show the animation box. It will be blank, as shown in the following screenshot, as we do not have an animated object to select yet:

5. Finally, we can take a look at the Layers tab to see the different layers of our layout. Once again, there isn't much to see as we only have a blank game project right now, as in the following screenshot:

1. Open your blank game project from last time, or if you feel like getting some more practice, create a new one.

2. Right-click inside the layout editor, and click the Insert an object option shown in the following screenshot. This can also be done by double-clicking on a blank space of the layout.

3. We now have the following object creation box where we can see all the types of objects we can insert into the layout. These are pre-programmed objects created in C++. Select the Sprite object and click on Insert. This can also be performed by double-clicking the Sprite object. Now, we can click inside the layout to place the sprite object.

4. We are then shown an image editor for our sprite. For now, we will make a simple square graphic as shown in the following screenshot. To do this, click the paint bucket, choose a color, and then click an empty space in the graphic space.

5. Now, click the x button to return to the layout editor. Click on Yes when asked to save, and we will now have a sprite in our layout as shown in the following screenshot:

6. We can use the white box in the middle to change the angle of our sprite and the boxes on the edge of the sprite to change its size. Try matching the following shape:

7. Now, open the Properties box on the left side, and scroll down to the option Make 1:1 in the Properties group. Clicking on this will make our sprite return to normal size again, as in the following screenshot:

8. We now know how to resize and rotate the sprite object. We can also do this by modifying the values in the Common group. Open this group and try changing the X, Y, Width, Height, Angle, and Opacity fields to see what they change. It is worth noting that a lower opacity value makes the sprite object more transparent, and recently changed values will be shown in bold.

9. We can also give our sprite object a name just by changing the Name box. This is useful, as later we will be using many different sprite objects to create our games. For now, scroll down in the Properties box to view another group called Appearance; toying around with the values Skew X and Skew Y produces distortions, shown in the following screenshot. Notice that the selection box for the sprite does not skew with the sprite itself.

10. We can also tick the Invisible on start checkbox. This lets the graphic be shown in the editor, but hidden when the game is run. This is good for making invisible walls and other such objects.