Comments for Stencyl Tutorial 2: Attributes, Etc.

Sorry, I assumed that the default was "fade out" for everyone for the first position. I'm glad to see that you are playing around with the coding though, tis the best way to learn :)

Thank you! I have been waiting for the proper time to let users know about the shift-click (which I use many times per day :P), but I was unaware of the alt-click. Will update the description to include that (doesn't really fit in the two lines per scene). EDIT: Will be mentioning both in the upcoming tutorial :)

I'm glad it helped you to get your start :). Best of luck to you!

Glad you found it ;). Yeah, it's in a different place than the rest :P.

Switch the group for colliding shape to actor 2 instead of actor 1 and it should work :)

You don't need categories. Just ignore that part. This was made with Stencyl 1.1, which is very rarely used now (although the concepts are the same). I do have the start to the 2.0 tutorial set done, which you can find here: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Abigayl/stencyl-2-0-tutorial-1-basics

Sorry, my bad. But it is in tutorial 3 (just double-checked and it's indeed there :P).

That's in tutorial 5... I was trying to figure out the best, simplest way to do edge detection and nothing ended up working, so I had to show my less-elegant ways of keeping the playing in-bounds.

Aye, I use 640x480 as my default but the main default is 640 x 400 or something (forget the exact measurements)

Make sure you are using the [ + ] that is for TEXT not for NUMBERS (there is a big difference)

Ah, someone using the Stencyl 1.1 version... this tutorial originally had the comparison operators from the "Numbers & Text" palette, but so many were using a later version that I had to photoshop my guide to show the updates. Glad you found them though.

Glad you figured out the error. Things like that will keep coming up (even I do similar mistakes sometimes), so keep a sharp lookout. ;)

Can you explain a bit more what the issue is? Perhaps add screenshots of the behaviors (upload then send me the link)

You attach it to the opening scene, or whatever is the very first scene in your game. It's basically the first thing you need your game to do.

Thanks :)

Game attributes (purple) are stored globally, so any behavior can open it. The issue is that when you currently have a behavior open, it won't show until you close the behavior and re-open it. Sorry, should have mentioned that detail.

I remember others who have seen that issue. It doesn't seem to be too bad if you are running as the administrator, but you still may want to post it to the Stencyl forums to see if someone else knows more. Here's the related topic I found: http://community.stencyl.com/index.php/topic,5389.msg34778.html#msg34778

Congrats on the highscore! :) I'm glad to be of help to those learning Stencyl :)

Aye, the more you learn, the faster you can go.

I'm glad you're liking them :).

:) If there is anything missing that you would like me to cover, let me know.

Wow, someone noticed my grammar! I actually was improper a few times, primarily semicolon issues, just to keep the flow better. To my knowledge there is no way to make something truly persist across multiple scenes. There are two alternatives though: One is to group many scenes together into one giant scene (this tutorial actually is comprised of only 6 actors and 1 scene) or use a game attribute to store the (x,y) of the actor and create it at that point in the next scene. I may go into RNG more in-depth later on once I get a full taste of it in one of my game ideas (which would be almost 100% based on layers of RNG code).

That's one that will have to wait a while... last I read about them, it was bugged, so I never recycle actors either...

You have to Click "Add Event", then go into "Basics" to find it. See the "Extra Information" section in the news posts. :)

Care to explain what was hard about it via PM?

Did you make sure to use a "do every" loop instead of "do after"? Also, are you sure the behavior is attached? If you want to, upload the game to Forge and send me a PM with the name, and I'll try to see what's going on with it.

You first publish it to flash. Then, go to the site that you want to upload it, and find the upload area, and import the file there. (On Kongregate, there is a link at the bottom of the page for developers/uploading a game.)

It's saying that if the current score is higher than the high score, then replace the high score with the current score.

The learning cycle is indeed one of growth and relapse. Just make sure you're making two steps forward and only one step back. I've even had it happen to me (when I had to check tutorial 2.5 a while back I had totally forgotten about that option for making menus; I was pleasantly surprised and the brilliant simplicity of it... which I had forgotten about after teaching others about it :P).

I don't understand your question. Can you rephrase it?

Yes... what's the problem? That's a getter (you can drag it in to use it wherever you need a number). If you want to set it, change to the setters option.

Thanks

Good :). I'm happy it helped

I would have to see your code to know what happened.

Glad you figured it out :). Default is 384 for height (although I personally thing the 3:2 ration looks a lot better).

When you made the game, you decided the size of screen to make it. If you have forgotten, check either the dashboard (older versions of Stencyl) or the Settings button near the top to check the size. Then, use those numbers.

When you upload the game to Kongregate, if you want to see the leaderboard, be sure to check "display in leaderboards" option and give it a name.

That's a common question, one that is answered in this tutorial set, part 5, and to a degree, set 2, part 2 (that one only covers the bottom, but you can adjust to to be in all directions). The basic idea is to check in "always" to see "if [x of self] < 0 OR [x of self - width of self] > [screen width] OR [y of self] < 0 OR [y of self - height of self] > [screen height]" (then do your coding, either killing self or pushing self back on to the screen). To make it work, in "when created" set self "make self always active" to make it still take in coding when beyond the screen. Hope that helps. :)

A setter will store the information in the attribute, and a getter uses that information from the attribute. For example, if you "set X to 10", you are telling the computer that when it sees the "X" to think of "10" instead, so when you "get X", the computer spits out "10" instead. Does that make more sense?

Thanks, and agreed, it does make the learning easier :)

Yep, the coordinates in the upper left are (0,0) and the bottom right is (width, height), so if you are trying to put an actor in the corner, you will need to adjust accordingly. To get the precise corner, regardless of size, in the scene palette, you can find a code that gets the scene height/width.

Could you send me a screenshot of your code or upload it to forge to let me see it?

Glad to help :)

It would help if I could see the game itself. Did you remember to tell the enemies to kill themselves when off screen? If not, that could be the issue.

If you are going for online multiplayer, Stencyl is not really the tool to use. You'll want to get familiar with using AS3 coding and likely have to get the Adobe official programming program (forget the name of it offhand). Online multiplayer game creation is ONLY recommended for advanced programmers (it's beyond my skill level).

If you are looking for true multiplayer games, Stencyl is likely not the tool for you. It is designed for simpler games, and online multilplayer is much more complex. If you just mean local multiplayer, the basic idea is to split up the WASD controls to be one player and arrows to be the other (like Fire Boy & Ice Girl games).

The scores are individual for each user but go into the same shared leaderboards... I'm not exactly sure what your question is.