Clickteam User Spotlight # 55

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<td align="Center">Clickteam User Spotlight # 55 - Nifflas
Clickteam is proud to bring back the User Spotlight feature to the forums. Every week we will try to post 10 of the most interesting answers out of our Spotlight questionnaire answered by select community users and contributors. This week we are featuring forum user Nifflas creator of excellent MMF made games like Saira his recent project!</td>
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<td>Where do you call Home?</td>
<td>Right now it's Umeå, which is located in northern Sweden. However, home is not necessarily a physical location, home is wherever my friends are.</td>
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<td>What is your occupation (day job) if you are not employed to program with a click product?</td>
<td>I used to help out intellectually handicapped people writing a newspaper, but right now I'm going to see if it's possible to make a living out of creating and selling games, and I'm working for the company Kreator in Umeå on this.</td>
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<td>What is your current computer setup, number of computers, hardware and software used?</td>
<td>My work PC is a HP 6028s laptop, with Multimedia Fusion 2 Developer and a few different graphics and music software. I got a Zoom H2 (portable microphone) which I use for a lot of music and sound effects in my games, and a neat midi controller to do real time parameter tweaking in music and live sessions.</td>
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<td>How many years of experience do you have in programming and using a click product?</td>
<td>I started out soon after Klik & Play was released. There were a few years when I didn't use IMSI/Clickteam products because I had failed attempting to create huge RPG's way too much, but I've been using every product in the series. </td>
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<td>What is your favorite Video Game Title and why?</td>
<td>Still ICO for the PS2, nothing have got close to that experience. Team ICO added minimal amounts of what a good game is supposed to have (music, weapons, enemy types, etc), and yet managed to pull it off with perfection.
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<td>What current project(s) are you working on?</td>
<td>That's a secret! I'd say I'm creating a game with mechanics from a NES game I loved as a child and still play every now and then. If people end up complaining it's a clone and that it's unoriginal they'll be right, but this is what I want to do right now. </td>
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<td>What inspired you to start your current project?</td>
<td>Sorry, that's also secret! If I said that, I'd reveal too much.</td>
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What direction you would like to see the Clickteam product(s) go? </td>
<td>I think it needs to be more consistent and needs better programming options. I believe MMF can be made more beginner friendly at the same time as it gets more advanced for the skilled users, but this means that the reset button has to be pressed and the product must be changed more than backwards compatibility allows. A lot of people think that making MMF3 better is all about adding all this functionality to the top of what we already have, but I want to see a smaller more efficient MMF3 than MMF2. Drop all the unimportant stuff, everybody today have Direct3D 9, so drop 8. Drop the DirectX software rendering mode because the performance difference between that and Standard is minimal. Drop all those heavily specialized extensions that most of us doesn't use. Drop lives, scores, player controls, and all those things from Klik & Play, less features means less to comprehend and less work for Clickteam. Instead, just make a tutorial that teaches the beginner to use a global counter object for lives and score.Introduce sub-conditions and sub-events, add else, elseif, functions and foreach.

Get rid of all built in movements. It's a drastic step, but this could be replaced with a better behavior system. If library behaviors were assignable to objects like movements are now, and if they could carry their own "hidden" values that are only seen in the behavior code itself, but also display visible values in the objects properties for stuff that communicates with the behavior (maximum speeds, control buttons, etc) and none of these values would interfere with the object's alterable values - then the beginner could assign these behaviors to objects to make them move or be clickable/draggable/anything. MMF3 could ship with a bunch of nice behaviors replacing the currently used bouncing ball, platform movement, etc. and the community could create more of them. With support for more programming options as the ones I suggest above, these movements would be very efficient since they would require so few events compared to today. The advanced users could make complex movements that is easy for a beginner to manage. With an extension/widget upload/download database with a rating system built into MMF3 itself, we could all contribute to a growing central of easy to use behaviors and widgets. That's how we'd get rid of all these limited one-trick pony features without sacrificing a single bit of user friendliness. Clickteam would also have to work less on all the things that are currently built into MMF2 if they instead became community based.
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<td>What have you found to be the easiest thing about using Multimedia Fusion / The Games Factory tools?</td>
<td>Creating stuff quickly. I was the programmer for a game named "Find Love" at the Nordic game jam and we did a really cool game in 48 hours, and at two previous similar events (No More Sweden 2008 and 2009) I also did neat stuff with MMF2 in very limited time.
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<td>Please tell us your favorite part of your typical day but in Event editor format. (IE: Condition: Alarm rings Action:Get out of bed)</td>
<td>Event Line 1: CONDITION: Clock equals 19:00 ACTION: Phone friend! Hang out!
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<img src="http://nifflas.ni2.se/content/screenshots%20saira/01%20BG.png"></img> 
Visit Nifflas Website at: <A Href="http://nifflas.ni2.se">http://nifflas.ni2.se</a>

You can visit the old Spotlights 1-53 at the following link.... <A Href="http://www.skiosk-esd.com/clickteam/SPOTLIGHT53.htm">http://www.skiosk-esd.com/clickteam/SPOTLIGHT53.htm</a>