Ever since Scirra officially started in 2011, we've been all about game creation. Now we're taking a big step and for the first time ever we're announcing a new product! From today we're launching a public beta of Construct Animate, a new animation tool. Try it out right now at animate.construct.net/beta.
What is Construct Animate?
Back in 2019 we introduced timeline animations. Since then we've steadily made lots of improvements such as audio tracks for timelines and adding complementary features like scene graph (much of it thanks to Diego's hard work). Now Construct has fully fledged animation features, and we've heard from individuals, businesses and educators that it works great for making animated content - but sometimes they need a way to export their animations as videos. So we built a new product for them, and designed a new Export to Video feature for it too!
In short Construct Animate is animation software with all the game-related features of Construct like the Platform behavior taken out so you can focus on your animation work, and with a new ability to export your project as a video file with faster-than-realtime encoding. Construct Animate still provides a wide range of interactivity features including mouse/keyboard/touch input, form controls, networking, using data formats like JSON, and loads more (see below), all with Construct's leading visual block-based system. We think it will be a great addition for educators who can now use it for animation lessons as well as for games, for businesses to develop training materials and videos, individuals for developing banner ads, animated website media, and creative work, and much more.
Features
We know there are other animation tools out there, but here are a few highlights of Construct Animate and some of the things that distinguish it from other tools.
- Timeline animations for sequencing movements and changes over time, including with custom ease curves
- The best visual block-based system for creating interactive logic in Construct's Event Sheets. It's ideal for animators without programming experience, and yet powerful enough to make impressive and sophisticated content.
- Export to video to quickly get a video file of your animation with faster-than-realtime encoding and including audio.
- Export to the web and for Playable Ads for content like banner ads and interactive media.
- Effortless support for modern hi-dpi and high refresh rate displays, and automatic display scaling to any resolution.
- Instantly loads in any browser. There's nothing to install! It'll run on everything from Windows to Chromebooks, and it works offline too.
- A simple and easy-to-use interface.
- A built-in image editor and animations editor for frame-by-frame Sprite animations.
- Use hierarchies to connect objects so they move, scale and rotate together.
- Use layers and sub-layers for managing complex content and advanced compositing effects.
- Apply over 80 different effects to individual objects, layers or layouts, including PhotoShop-style blends like Screen and Overlay, hue rotation, color replacement, blurs, distorting, and masking - and even stack multiple effects.
- Use Live Previews to adjust things like particle effects live in the editor.
- Video playback with any browser-supported format
- Use mouse, keyboard, touch and even gamepad input for interactivity.
- Integrate web content like YouTube videos, iframes, and custom HTML and CSS content.
- Use form controls like Text Input to collect details from viewers.
- Audio playback for music and sound effects, including with audio effects like low-pass filters, delays and convolution.
- Nearly 100 built-in example projects.
- Easily view your content on mobile devices with Remote Preview.
- Networking features like AJAX and WebSockets, along with using data formats like JSON.
- Advanced text features like BBcode formatted text and SpriteFonts.
- Mesh distortion allowing deforming various objects for new kinds of effects.
- A debugger and profiler to inspect your animations and get a deeper insight to how they work in practice.
- Flexible search tools including 'Find all references'.
- Multi-monitor support
- Advanced users can use JavaScript coding for enhanced interactivity with an industry-standard programming language. Or even use it to learn JavaScript!
- A gaming-grade renderer with outstanding performance that can handle whatever content you throw at it (and with WebGPU support on the way too).
- Unique support for rendering with OffscreenCanvas in a Web Worker, ensuring animations run perfectly smoothly and jank-free on the web, even with other intensive web content running simultaneously.
The public beta
We're launching Construct Animate as a public beta. This means it isn't quite ready. There's a fair bit more to do, including on branding, feature development, bug fixes, and listening to your feedback. We're inviting the wider world to get involved, try it out, and let us know what you think. Please note this means it is not necessarily representative of the final product.
At the end of the public beta, Construct Animate will be sold as a separate product. It'll provide a lower-cost way to get started with Construct. Since the two products are based on the same style editor, it will be easy for animators to switch over to game creation, and vice versa.
For the duration of the public beta only, we're allowing people with existing Construct 3 subscriptions to also use the full features of Construct Animate. However this will stop working at the end of the public beta. To make sure this is clear you'll see a prompt every time you log in using an existing Construct 3 subscription reminding you that it will no longer work with Construct Animate at the end of the public beta.
Video introduction
For a video introduction to Construct Animate, including what it can do, how to use it, and the new Export to Video feature, check out the video below.
Are you giving up on games?
We're absolutely not giving up on game development! While this is a new experiment we're trying, we've spent over a decade working on game creation software, and we are definitely going to keep going with that too. At times like these some people like to predict the demise of our company, but we can reassure you we aren't about to abandon our existing product which is still producing virtually all our revenue. But we're also pretty excited about where our new product will go as well. It's also likely that almost all improvements for Construct Animate will improve Construct 3 too, as it also includes many of the same animation features like timelines.
Try it out now
That's enough from us! We're keen for you to try it out and start telling us what you think and if you run in to any problems. So give it a go: visit animate.construct.net/beta and get started!