Learning Targets: Students will be introduced to industry recognized game development software Students will learn how to navigate within the software Students will learn the basics on how to use Construct 2 to create actual working games
The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce you to the Construct 2 program First, you will be told where the software is located on the computer Second, you will be taken through the program explaining what everything does
About Construct 2 Construct 2 is for beginner programmers and includes great tutorials, wonderful forums and help documentation Construct 2 let's you do much of the programming just by clicking on icons (like using Windows). NOT all game engines work like this
About Construct 2 Construct 2 requires no coding background and allows anyone to build games Construct 2 is a groundbreaking HTML5 game creator that is designed specifically for 2D games Construct 2 makes it easy to share and play your games from any browser on any device
Program Location The Construct 2 software program is located in the G:/ drive of the computer. Since the software is on the G:/ drive, you will have access to the program from any computer in the building; meaning you could work on projects at any time during school, from any computer.
Program Location The G:/ drive is in the same location as your student (S:/) drive 1) Double-click the G:/ drive to open 2) Double-click the Bowman folder 3) Double-click on Construct2 Shortcut
There might be a couple of dialog boxes that pop-up once the program opens, if this happens, just close those boxes. So lets begin..
Here is what the program will look like:
At the top left you ll see the Quick Access toolbar. This is made up of six tools that will make it easy to use the actions you ll use a lot. First there s the cog image, which is the Construct symbol. You can use this to easily resize your Construct 2 program.
The Second icon is your normal save icon. This will let you save your game or if it's your first time saving this will have you name and save your game. The next two icons are the Undo and Redo Buttons. These will help you if you accidently delete something or if you add something that you want to get rid of. The drop down arrows next to them can let you go back to specific points you did something.
Fifth there's the Run Layout button. Think of this as the play button to try out your game layouts. Clicking this play button will launch the game in a browser. The last button is the Debug layout button. This is useful to use whenever you can't figure out what is wrong with your game. This will launch the game in debug mode which will let you see everything happen as your game progresses.
Below your quick toolbar, you'll see the menu options. These include File, Home, View and Events. The File menu consists of the opening, saving and closing operations for your projects.
NEW New is the way that you'll start every project. Doing this will launch the project template options. For all of your projects you'll be using the New empty project setting. There's however many options and possibilities that you can use to customize your project. You can customize to start at different widths or fit certain screens like an ipad.
OPEN Open will let you open any saved projects. You can also use the Recent Projects section to open recently closed projects.
When you want to save there are three different options you could use. Save Will save to wherever you already saved to or will have you name and pick a location to save your game. Save As Project... This is a way to save to a new location or rename it while saving it as a project. Save As Single File... This does the same as Save As Project except this saves a compressed version of your game. This will be what you'll use in all your games. The first save needs to be this, but once you have the initial save you can use the quick access toolbar save.
Export Project Export Project is how you would move your project to a different format to put on a website or on the app store. You won't use this in the course, but you can use this on your own games.
Close tab Close tab will close the current project sheet you have open. Close project Close tab will close every sheet in the project. These are mostly used when switching between projects or comparing different project sheets.
On the bottom of the File options you'll notice five separate buttons. These include Store, Help, About, Preferences, and Exit. Of the five you only need to know the last two.
On the bottom of the File options you'll notice five separate buttons. These include Store, Help, About, Preferences, and Exit. Of the five you only need to know the last two. Preferences Should never have to change, but you should know the location just in case you need to change a setting in Construct. A setting you might want to change later would be how many back ups Construct saves. Exit Will exit out of the Construct program.
The Home Menu will bring up these actions to use. You'll notice some of the quick toolbars are in this section.
You can use the Paste, Cut and Copy to add or take away objects in your layout. The last three actions that you'll use are Delete, Select All and Select None. Delete is used for deleting objects in your layout. Select All is to select all of one kind of object or all objects in a layout. Select None is used to deselect everything.
The View menu will deal with everything you can see. The Bars section has to do with what side bars are visible. You should always have these six checked.
The Zoom section deals with your layout zoom. Grid options and Grid size will be covered later on. The style section will change your display and colors of Construct. The Display section will show collision polygons and layers.
The Events menu will add all our event sheet items. All of these are easier to add on the event sheet than from the menu so you won't be using much of this menu. Since you will not be using this much we will not go over this tab in the tutorial.
The next bars to look at are the Projects bar and Layers bar located along the upper-right hand side of the workspace. By default these two share the same spot and you tab between the two.
Start with the Projects tab. This shows everything that you have in your project. From the folders you can see that this will show you all Layouts, Event sheets, Object Types, Families, Sounds, Music, and Files.
Switch to the Layers tab.
At the top of the Layers bar there are seven tools to help you manage your layers. The plus icon will add a new layer to the top of all your existing layers. The eye icon will toggle whether the layer is visible. You can also use the check box next to the layer. If the box is checked it's visible.
The lock icon will lock the layer making it not able to be edited or any objects on that layer to be moved. You can also click the lock left of the layer name to lock it. The pencil icon will let you rename the layer.
The trash can icon will let you delete the selected layer. The up and down arrow icons will change the order of layers. You can also drag the layers to the order you want.
The next bars to look at are the Objects bar and Tilemap bar located along the lower-right hand side of the workspace. Since you do not have any objects in your layout you will be introduced to these two bars at a later time.
This is the end of getting familiar with Construct 2. There are of course additional things not covered, but the previous slides will serve as a good starting point when navigating through the course. You are now ready to start creating your first game.