Really awesome Kenney Jam this year. I can’t believe I got everything working when I did. About 2 hours left to go (an hour after I said I wanted to be finished) I found basically a game breaking bug and the nature of the way I do things in these jams and with construct is…. to just hodgepodge the mess outta the build.. lol Once I get into this sorta flow of building I just keep going, the ideas some quick and with construct the implementation of those ideas is almost just as quick, so once something works, I test it once and then move onto the next thing. Thankfully I was able to fix the bug and get everything working again. The bug is still there I just created new code that fixed it.. lol and it worked… idk.
I started making the 2D game and about halfway though I just didn’t like it much, it felt boring (which is sorta is) I thought of how I could lean into the boring aspect. Also I realized that my first game was pure 2D, my second game was 3D with 2D puzzles… I thought it would be neat to do 2D game with 3D puzzles and thats when my brain got excited and I basically kicked into high gear.
It was exciting because Construct 3 just came out with a 3D editor for their engine. Coming from 2 games were I had to build 3D games in a top down perspective… this addition was a godsend. I literally think it sped up development by 60%. The 3D level building took SOOOOOO long in Sparknoid, because you had no way to know if something looked right until you played. So you would place an asset test and see it was floating, or in the wrong place. So basically every placed asset had to be tested.
With the 3D editor I could build out 3D levels ALMOST like in Unity, it’s still a little jank but it’s sooooo much better. I honestly can’t wait for more updates to 3D, I really think it’s going to move Construct into a much more serious dev space.
Another thing I realized, after building SparkNoids and Between Two Worlds my Construct skills have greatly leveled up. Sparknoids and Between Two Worlds were the most complex things I have ever built, but I realized how they could have been made in a much more simple way when I was making AXIORA.
For example in Sparknoid when you started a 2D puzzle I physically moved the camera to a whole new place in the 3D world to show the 2D gameplay, when it would have been 100% easier to just do a jump to a new scene, I would have ended up with about 90% less problems and could have probably made 3 or 4 more levels. I can’t tell you how much this helped me in making AXIORA, 3 years ago I would have never been able to build this game. Which really I think is what these jams are all about, learning and coming up with cool ideas on the fly.
I did just update Nexify and Sparknoids to support the meta narrative inside of AXIORA, probably 1% of people will see the content, but it was neat to do anyhow and only took maybe an hour to implement. Even though it’s small, it’s cool to sorta have an audience of people who are interested in what I’m doing video game wise.
