Tutorial

Page 12 of 15

Final Polish - Backgrounds

Our first game is ready but it needs some finishing touches to make it a bit nicer. For example, some music, a score display, a nicer background... These are all things that will improve the game and make it a nicer experience for those that play. To start with, let's add a background...

The grey background of the room is rather boring, and so we are going to use a new type of resource, the Background resource. To add one, go to the Resources Menu and choose Create Background. The Background Properties window will appear, and you should click on the "Name" field and rename it to "bck_main". Now, click on the Load Background button, navigate to the Catch the Clown Assets folder and select the image file background.png.

We need to assign this background image to the room, so double click on the game room in the resource tree to open it up, then click on the "Backgrounds" tab. You then need to de-select the property Draw Background Colour (as we do not need to) then click on the little menu icon in the middle and pick the "bck_main" in the pop-up menu.

As you will see, in the room we suddenly have a nice background. Note the two properties Tile Hor. and Tile Vert. that are available on this tab. They indicate that the background must be tiled horizontally and vertically, that is, repeated to fill the whole room. For this to work correctly the background image must be made such that it nicely fits against itself without showing cracks.

The room editor tab should now look like this:



Play the game again and you should notice that this simple change gives a big improvement to the final "look" of your game!



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