Construct Classic Tips & Tricks
2026/01/22
As an avid though rather incompetent user of CC (as I have made little effort to learn the program beyond the very basic functionality I require), I have some tips to share.
- A zip file with "all effects and plugins" has circulated around for over a decade, however, it is incomplete. This is the one you should download instead.
- Turn off persists. In a nutshell, construct treats every open layout like a browser treats an open tab. With persists turned on, the program keeps information about your open tabs and loads it each time a project is opened. This is completely useless and prevents projects from otherwise being loaded near instantly.
- Always use pngs. Construct converts all jpegs back into png, thus you're left with a file that is both uglier and heavier than it would have been. Consider saving your png files with 24bit color depth or less (in many cases, 8 bit is more than enough).
- If a newly added event somehow appears as a duplicate of the one above it, save immediately. Clicking anything else crashes the program instantly. After reloading, you will see that the event is now displayed correctly.
- If the gui is beginning to flicker and parts of it vanish, save immediately. It will soon throw an error and prevent you from saving. This is usually triggered by moving objects around, mainly by keyboard. Save a lot when you do that.
- Never use the default save/load events. Saves are unreliable and usually refuse to load, loading can duplicate objects, etc. There are better options like INI.
- Take note of slow saving/compilation and the stretch bug. If these get too long / the stretching appears during either, your project is too heavy. This problem is inevitable but can be slightly delayed by not using large images and/or too many images.
- You can see if the images you import bloat the game or not by checking the .cap filesize before and after adding an image and saving.
- Some functionality of plasma is very unreliable and causes crashes.
- Sine is not very compatible with custom movement. They can only be added to an object in a specific order, or else the game won't start.
- Adding more than 2 sine behaviors will crash construct.
- Your game can generally run well at any framerate, however, particles are heavily affected by it. Ideally, run the game at different framerates, find the cut off point at which the particles start to look wrong (for example, in one of my games, at 60fps particles covered the whole screen, but only the center at 180) and either inform the player or add a framerate setting that doesn't reach that point.
- Avoid the default fullscreen mode, as it is crappy and can crash construct. Use the window plugin instead.
- Familiarize yourself with the interface, conditions, events, effects, everything! You will find that a lot of things are very intuitive.
- Even if point sampling is selected, some players may have enabled settings in their system (like the NVIDIA panel) that force all games to have linear sampling instead. If you use sprites for backgrounds and they are arranged perfectly in a grid, they will show the background due to having their sides blurred. Mediate this by increasing the image by 2 pixels in height and 2 in width. Copy the leftmost part of the image into the newly made column on the right, the rightmost part to the left, etc, the corner pixels can be anything. Make it so when 2 sprites connect, these parts overlap. This will leave no gaps, and will also not be noticeable at all!
- Don't install older versions of construct on modern systems. Because all versions share the same folder in AppData, you will permanently fuck up the search bar in the "add object" screen, which will now cover half the window whenever anything is selected.
Back to Articles