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Ideas for plugins
Hey! Seeing how popular has become the tween plugin, with most of the recent games including some kind of smoothing animations, I would love to hear from you what other plug&play functionality you would like to see in your games. Something that you say ... hey, I want **this**! And **this** happens in one line of code! And it's a big quality of life improvement for most of the games. Here are some examples we have been thinking about. - Level management. Although it could be managed by the storage plugin, something that helps just transition from one level to another would be nice. For example, levels.startLevel(xxx), levels.restartLevel(xxx) ??? - (G)UI widgets, like top / bottom bars, maybe predefined healthbars, remaining life widgets? background management? or other predefined and very reusable widgets ready for you? - Particles, SFX? For example, glowing / halo effects, ring effects, fireworks - Physics? For example, adding gravity, weight, bouncing values... What do you use the most that you need to trick yourself? Anything you want to add? Thank you ❤️
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Another idea I had, that may be kind of niche, but would be super helpful, would be a customizable debug menu. I use hidden touch events, but having access to debugging saves TONS of time and may not be something everyone has considered.
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I pretty much love all suggested features, so if I had to rate them, this would be the order: Level management Physics UI widgets Half of the time for making the game for the previous contest, was spent on just making the level system, so having something like that already available, would save us a lot of time, and give us more flexibility to expand our games. Physics is yet another amazing property that can create super fun mechanics, but since this is currently not supported, I've had to trash many ideas and settle for games that are laggy or not working as they could. And UI elements is another huge aspect that takes a lot of time implementing, and because the lack of layers, this process is a pain. And now that I think of it, maybe Layers could be a standalone feature, allowing us to assign assets to different layers, to get the precise layering we need. As for Particle Effects, I don't see that having as high impact on the editor as the other ideas, so I personally don't see much value in those kind of additions at this point.
Very useful feedback about the time spent on creating levels. Yes, we hear your pain :) Will figure out something. And yeah layers have been also recurrently mentioned here and there. What I'm thinking is that layers probably should be a core feature and be there just from the beginning. Just a property of the game objects. Thank you <3
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Your comment on physics and performance reminded me of the lack of : lines... I made some tests using box to replace lines but that resulted in laggy games too. I'll try to share a demo of the best I came up with. (but it's a bit out of subject as it's not a plugin)
There were also discussions somewhere about geometrical figures - circles, lines. We'll keep that in mind too. Thank you!
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I think a dedicated particle plugin that works with the tween plugin would be amazing. Something that sorts out the layering and updates properly, has predefined behaviors (smoke, fire, sparkles, etc.) and is able to called globally wherever you need it in the code.
Yes, I think there are a lot of sinergies between tweens and particles. Ideally they should not be coupled but working together very well. Thank you!
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I have to say something about the "tween" i didn't feedback sorry for that, so when the player get dragged by cursor it goes far from it, if you do 'make player follow the cursor' it will it or follow exact same time the player will stay with cursor ok, but when you do "plugin tween" the player will do a space be"tween" it and the cursor i try many times many lines to make it stay with cursor nothing work till i removed "plugin tween" then i make the player follow cursor again i add speed that make it track the movement of the cursor fast to move with it in time. my point is "tween" not good with dragging options not sure 100% maybe by doing more dragging in my games by time and see if that correct...thank you.
Absolutely, I agree. I’m sort of describing a system I implemented myself for my next game, a particle manager of sorts, but I’m having trouble with coordinates and the system updating the particles when I try to pass it to a class internally. Oh well, I’m learning slowly.
Interesting application of tweens. Can't say anything at this point but we'll try it out and see, there is an explanation for sure. Thank you!
@blackwidowink how, super interesting. I think particles and tweens would make such a powerful combo, almost the start of SFX
Hey, I want to generate (or upload) a sprite sheet of a character and *magic!*: I have a fully animated character ready to use :) More seriously : - Yes, some ready to use effects would be cool - Yes, ready to use physics would be could too I didn't start a game for the Idle Contest yet, but while thinking about it, an idea popped: If current storage plugin just had a 'shared' option, it would allow at least two awesome features: pseudo-multiplayer games & leaderboards...
About spreadsheets - we are definitely analyzing options here. We have been testing already options, seems generating sprite sheets is becoming a reality. There are some cropping stuff to solve over there. But when it happens I think it will just be a core functionality of the platform, not a plugin. About the storage plugin, let me talk to @josh to see what we can do over there! Thank you so much
Sorry I meant spritesheets not spreadsheets ... past excel traumas still arising from time to time 😂😂
No pb, it was easy to guess.😂 I just tried some AI generators... Leonardo gives nice results although not tailored to be used directly in a game. So for sure sprite sheets are a hard point. ...that's where a tiny image editor and/or image upload could come to the rescue ;)
Exactly! Our plan is a little bit of AI-driven spritesheet generation and custom editing / cropping tools
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How to manage sprite sheets to animate a character or even an effect? There is a short text instruction on how to use them all or should each movement be cut out individually "per frame"?
You have to cut them frame by frame then ask the Ai to make an animation with the assets. I usually add all the frames as invisible then make them visible turn by turn.
