Create games, write interactive stories, and build animations!
Note: an updated version of this tutorial is here http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/publishing-your-game-to-share-it-with-the-world/
Sharing your Gamefroot creations is simple. If you have published your game then it will appear on the Browse Games page (if it is popular enough), and the All Games page.
To share a specific game with people, click the share button underneath the game on the Gamefroot website.
Note: this tutorial has now been updated here http://gamefroot.com/knowledgebase/how-to-draw-your-own-game-objects/
With Gamefroot we make it easy for the entry level game designer to effortlessly create a game using the default assets, but for the next level of game designer* we offer a lot more customization. You can design your own characters, terrain, in-game items, and backgrounds. You can then upload these assets into Gamefroot to build games that are uniquely your own. In this series of tutorials I’m going to show you how to do all of that to create a masterpiece you can be proud of. *To take advantage of Gamefroot’s customization it is important that you have image editing software and a working knowledge of how to use it.
The single largest element in most games is the terrain tiles, so making your own terrain tiles is very important in game customization. All tiles in Gamefroot must be 48 pixels high and 48 pixels wide, and they must be PNG or GIF files. You can have objects bigger than a single 48 x 48 tile by making an object out of multiple tiles, or you can make an object smaller than 48 x 48 by leaving transparent space around the object inside the tile.
Think about the purpose of the tile. Is this an item? Will this tile be an obstacle? Remember that the whole tile will be solid, not just the part of the tile with artwork on it. If it is going to be a background tile then this doesn’t matter – the player won’t be bumping into it.
Also remember that terrain has 2 layers – take advantage of this to make cool layered effects.
Consider the visual style of your game. Draw up your concepts, and test them out with your other game elements to make sure they don’t clash or look weird. When I draw tiles I often work at 400 percent of the actual tile size – that way I can work on the details, and then shrink the artwork down to its proper size and make any tweaks that are needed.
If you are working on pixel art, you can do the opposite – work small and upscale it for the final version.
Once you are happy with your artwork, cut it into 48 x 48 pixel images and save them as either PNG or GIF files (PNG files have better transparency).
Now that you are ready to upload your new tiles, open up Gamefroot and select the Terrain Tab. Click the + button, browse to the image file on your hard drive, and select one or more images to upload.
Click Begin Upload and the files will start to upload. Once they have all been uploaded, close this box and your new terrain tiles will appear in “Your Terrain” tab.
The exact same process above applies to item tiles as well.
Now you can make games entirely out of your own tiles!
Happy game making!
Note: this tutorial is out of date. You can use the concepts from this tutorial combined with the up-to-date tutorials listed below:
You can make some really cool things in Gamefroot’s Advanced Behavior Editor, and there are a few core blocks that you can use over and over again to make interesting things happen. Today we will focus on using message blocks to trigger other blocks.
You can use message blocks to send specific messages that activate other behavior blocks, and you can set time delays on these messages. (These kinds of messages are different to in-game messages – they only send messages to other behaviors and these messages are not shown to the player in-game.)
In this tutorial we are going to use the power of timed messages to make a spring that launches the player into the air.
