An attempt at a video tutorial for Construct

In case you haven’t heard, I launched Construct on its own website today. You can check it out at constructyourcss.com, and share that site with your friends too. This marks the first step in my decision to treat and promote Construct as a serious layout tool, and I will continue to work on it as time goes on.

Now I have used Construct 0.4 for a site that I needed to deploy very quickly (think 1 hour) at work. With Construct, the layout took almost no time to complete and I didn’t have to think twice about how to get it right. Unfortunately, being the guy who designed Construct gives me an unfair advantage in knowing how to use it, and when I referred an acquaintance to it a few days ago (who claimed to like, “know CSS and stuff”), they gave up on it rather quick. So, I got to thinking about how to explain Construct to others. I figured a video tutorial would be a great way to do it.

A few months back I got a free version of Camtasia Studio 3 after hearing about it from a blog I follow. I hadn’t tried it until today, when I set out to record a tutorial on Construct. I loaded up Construct in its own window with Prism and began recording. I noticed the software didn’t seem to be auto-detecting my mic, but I went ahead anyway. After almost 10 minutes of putting together a complete tutorial, I played back the recording and heard nothing. I looked down at my microphone cord to discover that lo and behold, it wasn’t plugged in.

On second try, I had a great tutorial put together, but when I went into Camtasia Producer to convert it to a video file, it wouldn’t work. I was stumped. A quick search on the Interwebs led me to discover that while the recorder software works fine with Vista, the producer software that converts Camtasia’s proprietary format to a Windows AVI file does not.

At this point I was stumped. It didn’t look like I would get anywhere today. I kept looking for options when suddenly I came across a link to Camstudio.org. Were my eyes deceiving? Had the world of open source software rescued me yet again from the clutches of incompatible, proprietary software? Turns out, it had. Camstudio does exactly what I need to do, and it even offers direct AVI to SWF conversion, so that you can take your recording and publish it on the Interwebs for everyone to see.

And that’s exactly what I did. I now have a tutorial up at constructyourcss.com/tutorial.html which describes the complete process and all the keyboard functions to make a layout with Construct. Unfortunately, it’s not perfect; the file size is huge, so it’s only an option for Broadband users, and the sound is lousy because you can hear the static feedback caused by the vibration of my desktop PC’s fans. Still, it’s a start, and I’d be interesting in hearing some advice on how to produce better (and smaller) video tutorials like these; I’m thinking they would be very useful for the games we develop at work. Please share.