Guides:Castle Crash Course

This article is an outline for a future collection of guides, and is incomplete

The following is a possible rough draft outline

Introduction

Welcome to a crash course on how to build games and interactive art with Castle! In this course, you'll learn how build all sorts of blueprints, widgets and gizmos to make whatever you can imagine using the Castle editor. You'll have the know-how to build your own Castle adventure game and will have learned the ropes of how to craft even more custom creations.

Before you begin, make sure you have the Castle app installed on your device. Optionally, make a Castle account so that you can post your work as you finish it.

You can find Castle on the Google Play Store or iOS App Store. Move ahead once you have your own copy of the app!

Chapter 1 - Starting a new deck

Castle decks are what Castle is made of... they're collections of cards which are filled with games, curiosities, stories, and characters. When you first opened up Castle, you might have played the feed, an infinite stream of games made by real people.

Whenever you want to start a new deck of your own, just navigate to the Create screen and select the "New Deck" button on the top right.

From there, you'll have the option to select any of the kits featured on the New Deck menu, or you can pick "Blank" to make a deck without any preset contents. Let's make a new deck now, and let's start with a Blank canvas so that we can learn about some Castle concepts.

As soon as you tap on the Blank deck option, it will expand into an editor that fills the screen. The background is a light blue and there are white bars on the top and bottom of the screen. There are 6 buttons on the screen, so let's take a look at what all of them do.

1. On the top right is the back button, which will take you back to your create screen.
2. The play button in the top center will put your deck into play mode and let you try out what you've made so far. The deck is empty right now, so it will just be blank.
3. Next are the Undo and Redo buttons, which just let you roll back your previous action and move around through your changes.
4. The forth button, located in the top center, is the Tools gear icon. This button will open up the Tools menu to show you some extra deck options.
5. The save button will save your deck so that you can come back to it later. Do this often!
6. On the bottom center of the screen is the + button, which is how you add new actors into the scene.

Try taking a look at each button and experimenting with them so that you remember what they do in future.

Now you're ready to start modifying this card. Let's make a new blueprint.

1. Tap on the + button
2. Select "Empty Blueprint"

Chapter 2 - Movement and physics

Your deck is bustling with shapes and colors, but it's lacking something. There's no movement!

Chapter 3 - Touchable decks

Learn how to make actors controllable by the player.

Chapter 4 - Using Rules

Using rules to craft custom reactions

Chapter 5 - Labeling actors with Tags

Tags are a useful tool for helping actors to decide what to do when they interact with each other, or signaling for different events to happen.