Swaptroid Overview
Swaptroid was a game that I created for the MiniLD #59 event. The theme was Swapshop, where the objective was to create a game using the provided spritesheet. Also, you could make your own sprite sheet and submit it to the website. Then you could swap-in any of the uploaded sprite sheets into you game to give it an entirely new look.
Swaptroid Post Mortem
I had never created a game using Construct 2 before, so I thought that developing Swaptroid would be a good opportunity to learn that game development environment. I decided to just make a game in the style of a classic 8-bit platformer. I decided to use Tiled again for making all of the rooms in the level. I discovered that it was possible to import TMX maps created in Tiled using the tilemap object. Unforunately, the only way to change the image of a map was by base 64 encoding each of the spritesheet images. I also had to create a new animation manually for each sprite sheet for each of the player and enemy characters. After pre-loading all of the sprite sheet information, I was able to make the game change sprite sheets every five seconds.
The objective of Swaptroid is very simple. Defeat the enemies and collect the four items. The enemies just simply move back and forth horizontally. If I was to develop the game further, I would like to enhance the AI of the enemies and add new enemy types. I would also like to add various powerups for the player to collect to expand the player’s abilities.
I was disappointed that with the free version of Construct 2, it only allows 100 events to be created. It really isn’t possible to create much of a game with that constraint. The personal license is $130 and the business license (required if you make over $5,000 in sales on your game) is $430. Construct 2 isn’t a bad tool, but it’s hard to pay for a license when you can create 2D games in Unity3D for free. The only advantage Construct 2 has is the visual scripting tool, however I really prefer Stencyl’s visual scripting interface for creating 2D games.
Swaptroid Developer Commentary
Let’s Play Videos
Released