Struggling a lot, need a book

Hello all,

I bought this about a month before xmas, been using it a lot but I have to say I'm really struggling to do things in it, I don't blame the software, I blame my age and lack of education hehe.

anyway, there seems to be an utter shortage of tutorials on youtube so does anyone know of a good beginners book I can buy?

(the very limited stuff on youtube seems to be about creating platform games and I am trying to make a very basic slot machine game, so no tutes for that)

I don't mind paying £20-40 for a good beginners book.

Clickteam is advettizing this book ( look at the right side of this Forums Main Page ):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/178...&tag=clickteam

This area of the Forum contains guides, toturials and examples:
http://community.clickteam.com/forums/352-Guides-Tutorials-Examples-Widgets

This Forum is also a very good resource, and very helpfull if you have any questionmarks.

Hey PaulFoster,

The book is a great beginner book to learn terms and concepts but it won't help you make a slot machine game. The forum is the living Clickteam book! I promise, just ask your question and 99.99999% you will get what your looking for! Also, google what your looking for followed by the word clickteam. I just searched for Slot machine Clickteam in google and I found this! And don't give up. You'll get better.


http://community.clickteam.com/threads/71044-Slotmachine/page3

Personally I'd advocate getting the book. Right now your priority should be to learn, not to jump straight to the exact game you want to make. A slot machine game is more complicated than it sounds. If the game you're trying to make is not within your comfort zone, you'll likely get burned out during development and quit --- it doesn't matter how many tutorials there are for you to copy code off of. There's no substitute for learning how to do things yourself. Expand your comfort zone making simple, easy games first.

Hi all, thank you for your comments and Walrus you are right, I need to start smaller to get experience and for that I'm today trying to make a simple shooter/arcade game. Let me see if I can link an image of what I am trying to do:

http://s29.postimg.org/7xvyy57yf/game1.png

Okay, I'm trying to do a space game and want it to look a bit like the old 80's Vector graphics games. The idea is a space ship fixed in the center of the screen, you can rotate and fire but not move. Around you is a rotating shield (idea stolen from Stellar Castle if anyone else is old enough to have played it) and the shield is made from 5-6 sections, each section is destroyed when hit by an enemy.

I plan on having enemy ships spawn ever x seconds and head for the player.

I've spent 3-4 hours working on this so far and I'm rather happy with it, I managed to create a sprite of the ship, make it rotate and shoot! which for me is a great start! However when it comes to making the rotating shield I'm left scratching my head, I cannot just make a shield sprite as sections won't vanish when hit.

I guess I'll have to ponder on this for a while. but so far so good.

Coool idea.
The rotating shield part would be better done with six different objects, or can get complicated.

easy way:
draw an hexagon just like you did in the image above, and place its hot spot at center.
Clone it in 6 different actives, and then in each one of them remove all but 1 segment, so that in the end you'll have 6 different segments.
Now add all your segments to a same "qualifier"
(this would save you some time, check out qualifiers if you don't know them as they are a little hidden, but very useful)
and simply add this action:

always
>>> (yourshieldqualifier) set "angle" to (yourshieldqualifier angle) + "xx"

xx will determine the speed of rotation.

All segments will rotate around their "hot spot", being the ship position (center of the hex)


best way:
Segment creation at runtime from a single active, giving them ids and using some trigonometry for rotation


but easy way will do! ;)

Thanks for the help! Since I totally failed maths at school and wouldn't know trigonometry if it came up and hit me, I'll try your first idea.

Thanks very much!

Well I can't get it working but that's because a: I'm dumb and b: I have no idea what a qualifier is, even after reading about it. lol

I'm going to buy that book now (ebook version if i can find it) hopefully it'll help me a bit as I do get very annoyed and frustrated at myself for taking so long to learn things. :)

Hey Paul,
don't give up!

I'm sorry, I use qualifiers a lot and find them very handy,
but they are not absolutely necessary.

They simply allow you to put together many object into a single "group",
so that you can reference "the group" to affect any single object belonging to it.

Here's a superquick example:
Attachment 18949

I've given each shield part the "shields" qualifier,
then in the event editor, I refer to the "shield" and events affect all shield parts.

This avoids coding single actions for any single shield part.

You can add a qualifier in the frame editor,
select the object, go to left "properties" box, "events" tab (grid icon), "qualifier --- add"


(note: not saying you shouldn't get the book - it could surely give some useful info)

Wow you did that so quick!! amazing :)

obviously qualifiers are a very good tool and something I really need to learn how to use. Sadly there seems to be very few books and tutorial documentation on the software. Search for something like Gamemaker Studio (which I bought and uninstalled after a month lol) there is tons and tons of books and tutorials for that. Fusion seems not so, there are some videos on youtube but most seem to be about either platform games or endless scrollers.

Thanks a lot, I will study your example and hopefully something will sink into this dumb head of mine. also I've bought that book and hopefully it'll help!

Edit:- I'm trying to upload an mfa file to show what I've done but I'm not sure where to upload it to, I don't have my own webhost and I think a lot of the free file hosts have a heap of popups and crap. I'll have to see if I can find a suitable place.

Upload your mfa directly to the forum. Click "go advanced" below and manage attachments.

Thanks for that! I didn't know you could upload to the forum.

Okay, here is my file, feel free to correct me or crit it, as long as you realise this is my first attempt at a game and don't say "You suck noob" :D

Attachment 18962

I couldn't get the Hex shield working without it looking distorted when it turned :( so I chickened out and went for the easy option, 3 shields with a lame rotating animation. (yeah, I'm no artist)

I wanted to spawn enemy ships from random directions off screen but couldn't get it to work so again I took the easy option and simply did 2 different ships coming from top/bottom with a random x co-ord.

My latest issue is that I can't get the game to end haha. when my ship is destroyed it simply spawns another, no idea why but it does and I tried making a 2nd frame as a simple "game over" screen but then I couldn't figure out how to move to the screen after the ship destroyed animation was played, it only moved to it the instant the ship was destroyed. hehe I'm so crap at this.

anyway I'll keep working and see how it goes.

Hello Paul,
your first experiment is looking cool!

A couple things:

1) for shield distortions, in the example I sent you, you could try setting "quality" to 1 in the "set angle" event,
I'm sorry I left it to 0, setting to 1 will apply some resampling and look probably better (but your new animation is nice!)

2) your ship doesn't really destroy, because in your last two events, you only "destroy" enemy ships. You have to add another action in both events to "destroy" player ship also. No need to change animation to disappearing - destroy events will automatically sync animation to disappearing for you

and:

3) don't worry you're having the same difficulties everyone of us had first times dealing with Fusion ;D
it's incredibly easy and powerful - but this doesn't mean it has no learning curve

4) for how-tos, you should check out Snail's (Snail on) videos on youtube,
and Sparckman did a impressive repository of top-notch tutorials
there's definitely no info-shortage on this side in my opinion for Fusion.
You may also check Marvin's huge collection of examples
and the "technical manual" he compiled gathering very useful tips and informations (under "misc" section)
http://www.castles-of-britain.com/mmf2examples.htm

Thanks a lot, your advice and help is much appreciated!

How's your cat btw? ;)

Edit:- I know its incredibly basic but I'm quite happy with how this is coming along. got simple start/game over screens now and modified ufo animation and a bonus ship that comes every 10 secs. heh

This is really fun ..frustrating as heck at times, but really fun.

latest version:- Attachment 18964

That's nice,
I like the basic drawing stuff, very clean and "vectorial" feel
like old times arcades

(cat is fine, be assured, I'm not going to put him in a box with some odd machinery ;D)

This community is the best tutorial in my oppinion.

#1
There is however a section on this Forum for Guids, Toturials and Widgets:
http://community.clickteam.com/forums/352-Guides-Tutorials-Examples-Widgets

#2
If your wondering how a specific Object works, there is a "help" button in 'About' section of the Objects Properties which opens the documentation of that Object.

There is also a folder named "Examples" wich should contain .mfa examples of many/ most Objects shoing you how to use them.

...
Back to the topic.
I dont mean to confuse, but there is also another way of doing the Hex Shield without creating multiple clones or using Qualifiers.

I modified Schrodinger example.
Instead of creating 6 different 'Shield Objects' i have 6 Instancesof the same 'Shield Object' .
I then Spread/ assign IDs to each Shield Instance on Start Of Frame, and set each 'Shield Instance's initial Angle based on their IDs ( 360 divided by 6 ).

Noting wrong with using Qualifiers, this is just a different approach.

Wow, that is very clever stuff indeed! looks cool too!