I will start off by saying that Tips and Kliks is mostly intended to be aimed at novice to intermediate Klikkers. Tutorials for absolute beginners are important, but this is not one of them. We do have a good beginner's tutorial on this site already - see the Learning KNP FAQ.

I'd like to take the time to mention the Step-thru Editor because it's a novel concept, and also an important one. Before I was doing things in the Event Editor, I used the Step-thru Editor.

When you use the Step-thru Editor, your game will run until certain things happen, and then pause your game and bring up a dialog asking you what to do next, like this:

You'll see a row of icons. By clicking on one of these, you can select an action you want the game to take in response.

The capabilities of the Step-thru Editor are rather limited, especially when it comes to the number of conditions you can write actions for:

- An object leaves or enters the playfield on the left, right, top, or bottom edge.
- An object collides with another object.
- An object collides with the background.
- All objects of one type are destroyed.
- A player presses one of the fire buttons.
- A player loses all of their lives.
- A certain amount of time has passed (accessed by pressing the Esc key).

Additionally, if you are using Klik & Play, you may only perform actions on the object(s) that triggered the event in question, and you are limited to these four actions:

- Bounce
- Wrap around playfield
- Shoot another object
- Destroy

I don't think these limitations are necessarily a bad thing. Because only a small number of the available conditions and actions are exposed, it is much easier for new users to grasp the basics of how the program works. Of course, you can't do anything advanced with this, but that's not really the point - the Event Editor covers those bases.

Because these Tips and Kliks will mostly focus on working within the Event Editor, I would strongly suggest you tinker around with the Step-thru Editor first if you're still unfamiliar with Klik. Otherwise you won't find these articles very useful.

And have fun with Step-thru! I know I did!

(Note: The Step-thru Editor was removed since MMF2.)