Introduction to my CF2.5 Tutorials

Article written on 12/7/24.

Alright, so I would assume that if you're reading this, you know what Clickteam Fusion 2.5 is. However, there's a chance that you're a newcomer who was wandering my website, so very briefly - CF2.5 is a drag-and-drop application development program (mainly advertised for games) that doesn't require learning any programming languages to use.

Many, MANY tutorials exist for it and it's previous incarnations dating all the way back to 1997, so it's no trouble for newcomers to find a resource they can use to get their journey started. There's also a pretty active forum with lots of helpful people, and even simple Internet searches can reveal a lot of old sites and documents lying around with some pretty good information. And of course, Fusion's own included help contents are actually pretty good.

That being said, a lot of tutorials are very old, so I wanted to take the opportunity to jump in and use my 10 years of experience in the program to make some cleaner, more modern material. No crusty Multimedia Fusion 2 footage, weird silent or AI generated stuff, or painful bumbling 50 minute livestreams where the presenter keeps making mistakes and has to move the screen recorder around. I also prioritize written tutorials, so you can move at your own pace and not have to deal with video controls or blurry quality.

I mainly want to focus on the intermediate skill level. It's easy enough to learn the basics by following some video making a fangame or framework for a genre, but I want to cover the challenges you'll face when trying to expand, organize, and optimize things beyond that (for instance - adding controller support, but also allowing you to remap buttons). I also want to teach people about the intricacies you can only figure out through trial and error or research. Like did you know that there's an "Anti-Aliasing" checkbox that's off by default, that if ticked, can potentially increase performance by 40% for some reason? I hope to elaborate on weird little things like that.

To summarize, I want to make good, new tutorials for people who are serious about using Clickteam Fusion to make their games. So if you're serious, there's one last thing you need to know:

You need to get the Fusion 2.5+ DLC.

Yep. All of my tutorials are made using standard Clickteam Fusion 2.5 with the plus DLC, and I'm going to assume you have it as well. I love Fusion, but in my opinion, unless you buy the plus DLC, you're essentially buying a game engine from 2014. The Plus DLC adds not just quality of life features but objective engine improvements as well - ones that are absolutely necessary for a game made in 2024 and beyond. I could write a whole article going over every point and how much easier it makes things, but I'll summarize it with the two most important points for our purposes:

1. Child events. It's such a basic thing I'm actually shocked its DLC. Without it, you'll have a million copy and pasted lines, to the point where this feature has probably genuinely saved DAYS of my life.

2. Qualifiers in behaviors and global events. Oh my GOD is this necessary for projects that're larger than one frame. Now, if you have something like a platformer detecting when you land on an object with a ground qualifier, you can put it in the player object's behaviors and have it sync across frames as a global object. Without the DLC, you'd have had to copy and paste it across each frame. And oh yeah, you can edit qualifier names and icons too, so you can get rid of some of the more esoteric and weird ones.

Again, this is not even mentioning the system performance things and other useful features. In that sense you could go as far as saying that Clickteam is kind of scamming their customers by hiding these fundamental features behind a DLC, but Fusion has been stuck on 2.5 for so long due to development difficulties and delays with the infamous Fusion 3, so I think of this DLC as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge "Fusion 2.75" patch for the modern era.

So... are you ready?

With all this being said, I hope you'll join me for my future tutorials, and find them informative and enjoyable. Fusion is the last major paid software in the gamedev industry that doesn't take royalties or make you do recurring payments, all while being one of the few to genuinely attempt to innovate on the idea of programming. Even if you aren't here for money, Fusion will still pay for itself by always being available for your game making needs, and I hope I can show you what its capable of and make that initial purchase worth it.