Welcome to the ‘Tips & Tricks’ section of the course. This section will be updated periodically with new tips and tricks you can use to speed up your game/app design and development.
Version Filenames
It’s always wise from the start to version number your saved game files. Clickteam Fusion 2.5 uses it’s own extension (.mfa) to save your game/app data so rather than overwriting the same file, every time you add a new or important feature, save it as a version. For example, our very first save may look like this:
mygame_0-1.mfa but then you spent 20 minutes adding a new platform engine, save your next version as mygame_0-2.mfa.
Don’t save it as a new number every time, only when you think the time between the last save and the new save is worth a new version number (or in case something breaks, you can undo it by reverting to an older version).
Auto-Centre Hotspots
If you find yourself importing an animation and all of it’s hotspots are ‘out-of-sync’ you needn’t worry. There is a quick way you can select all the frames in the animation and centre the hotspots accordingly. Press Ctrl+A when in the animation editor to select all the frames (or right-click > select all) and hold down the ALT key whilst clicking on the centre hotspot on the left. This will align the hotspot to centre for all the animation frames. Like so…
Please note, this will only work 100% accurately if all the frame sizes are exactly the same width/height. If this is not the case, all hope is not lost. You can click on each frame in the frame window, then click into the image when hotspot mode is enabled and press NUMKEY 5 on your keyboard. Repeating this for all frames means you can quickly centre the hotspot (per frame) very quickly.
Event List Editor
As your event list gets bigger and bigger, sometimes it can be impossible to remember where certain events are that do certain actions. This can be frustrating but no more! If your event editor starts to look drab like this…
Then you can just quickly press Ctrl+L on your keyboard to switch to the Event List Editor, and now you can work like this…
Auto Duplicate
When dragging items from the left pane (objects window) or within the playarea frame itself, if you want to quickly duplicate something, just hold down the Control (Ctrl) key whilst you left-click and drag, it create a duplicate copy (not a new object).
Backups
In the Clickteam Fusion 2.5 editor preferences you can set it to backup your MFA files when you save. This is a very handy feature to have. Obviously if you have a big MFA it can be a lifesaver should something go wrong. Access the General Preferences dialog under the menu (Tools > Preferences). Considering how cheap Hard Drive space is today, I set mine to 20, at least. This will backup your MFAs in order with the extension .001, .002 etc. You can just rename these back to .mfa and you will be able to access your backed up MFA file.
New source backups
If you are working on a serious game or app project, I HIGHLY recommend you backup your files daily. The best way to do this would be to backup the entire folder your MFA is in. I do this religiously as you never know what could happen. Having backups can save hours, weeks, months or even years of work. You really wouldn’t want to lose all of that in the blink of an eye. If you have a USB Pen drive or hard drive, back up your work by copying the folder over to that.
If you are a forgetful person, I highly recommend FBackup. You can schedule a day(s)/times for automatic backup so you never miss out.
If you can backup to the cloud even better. Backup to Dropbox or OneDrive if you can. Backups are very, very important.