We're coming towards the end of another year, and it's time for our annual look back at the highlights of what the team got done through 2024 to bring you the best game creation software possible!
Construct releases
Through 2024 we made 60 releases of Construct - a little over one a week - covering r373 to r420.2. As ever you can find all the details on the releases page, but here are some of the highlights of new features released this year.
Flowcharts
A major new feature we added this year are Flowcharts. These allow creating linked sequences of nodes with a visual editor. It's a great way to have a visual representation of things like visual novels, conversation trees in an RPG, and finite-state machines. It also allows linking nodes to previous ones, which is harder to express in data formats like JSON. The new Flowchart Controller object lets event sheets move through flowcharts and access their state, much like the Timeline Controller object does for timelines. For an example of what you can achieve with flowcharts, take a look at the 'Sniff & Fetch' visual novel example in Construct. And this feature is available in Construct Animate, meaning you can also use it for interactive content like visual novels there too!
A flowchart being edited in Construct.Instances Bar
A popular feature request was a way to better manage hierarchies in the editor. So we build the Instances Bar as a new view to show things like hierarchies in a structured tree, with the ability to do things like drag-and-drop to rearrange the hierarchy. We went further and made it a general-purpose tool for inspecting instances in a layout, with additional views focused on layers, templates, timelines and more.
Using the Instances Bar to edit a hierarchy.New Linux & Steam Deck exporter
This year we also built an entirely new export option for Construct! We launched a brand-new Linux exporter based on the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). We built this with the specific aim of supporting the Steam Deck, which is a Linux-based system, also using our own Steamworks plugin for Steam integration. Naturally the Linux export also works on Linux desktops like Ubuntu, but it also runs on Raspberry Pi devices too, thanks to our ARM support! We've also done a range of other upgrades to improve desktop support, such as support for access to known folders like Documents with the File System plugin. Learn more in our blog Publish to the Steam Deck with Construct's new Linux exporter.
Kiwi Story running on the Steam Deck as a Linux exportHTML layers
In the past, you could use custom HTML content in Construct projects, but HTML content would always appear on top of Construct objects. This is because all Construct objects rendered to a single <canvas> element, and all other HTML content appeared on top. This year we introduced a feature to solve this limitation: HTML layers allow mixing both Construct layers and layers with HTML content! This means you can do things like integrate a scrolling HTML table and still have Construct objects render on top of it. See the HTML Layers example for a live demo, and see the blog post Better HTML integration with Construct's new HTML layers for more information.
Using HTML layers to display Construct objects on top of a scrolling HTML table.BBC micro:bit plugin
We built a dedicated BBC micro:bit plugin so Construct projects can access a BBC micro:bit device over Bluetooth. This allows things like displaying custom messages on the display, detecting button presses, and the device orientation - even allowing it to be used as a game controller! This is a great option for education, and a fun option for hobbyists who like to tinker with hardware. See Getting started with the BBC micro:bit for more details.
Follow behavior
The new Follow behavior makes it easy to have an object follow another one. You can see that in action with the Follow behavior example. More generally, it is based around recording the history of another object's movements and changes, and can replay them. This allows for powerful additional capabilities like Record and replay and Rewinding time.
Loads more!
We've added so much to Construct this year, it's difficult to even list everything! And that's on top of an already huge number of existing features. Here are some more highlights we've picked out from this year:
- Improvements for templates with hierarchies, including the option to automatically update all replica's hierarchies
- Image export improvements including support for the modern AVIF format and support for lossy spritesheets allowing for amazingly small project download sizes
- Video support improvements including support for the modern AV1 video codec, and better support for choosing primary and secondary video formats for full cross-platform support
- Support for instance tags to help identify specific instances, as well as an instance signals feature
- Support for animation frame tags to more easily identify specific animation frames, and dynamic animations allowing for runtime-generated animations
- Autocomplete for tags in event sheets, saving time and avoiding typos
- Right-to-left (RTL) text support for the Text object
- Support for PWA installation for all web exports with the Browser object
- The Auto reload all on preview option was extended to cover all kinds of file folders, allowing easier integration with external tools when using folder projects
- File System improvements include accessing known folders like 'Documents' in desktop exporters without any permission prompts or picker dialogs, as well as new 'Shell open' and 'Run file' actions
- Savegame improvements making it easier to save game data to other locations like saving to a file or to the cloud
- Absolutely loads more including changing what the 'Preview' button does, improvements for event variables, gamepad support for trigger rumble, dozens more usability and quality-of-life changes, loads of bug fixes, performance optimizations, and more. There's so much it was genuinely difficult to choose what to list here! If we missed your favorite addition this year, let us know in the comments.
New examples
This year we added over 70 example projects to Construct. These include examples of new features like Flowcharts and the Follow behavior and dozens of game templates, but also a few larger demo games, including Eventide, Fuji leaper, Grukkle onslaught, Kitty katcher and Pusha Pusha, which help showcase what you can achieve with Construct. As ever you can find all these and more in Construct's Example Browser.
The 'Eventide' demo game - one of our favorites!LTS releases
A big change we made to our releases this year was the addition of a new Long Term Support (LTS) release channel. LTS releases are much less frequently updated but are supported for 18 months from release, providing a more predictable platform for when it's important to avoid any unexpected changes, such as when approaching the launch of a big project. You can find a list of all our LTS releases here, and learn more in our blog post Announcing Construct LTS releases.
Web technology advances
As ever the web platform continues to improve, benefiting both Construct and all your projects. As with every year, absolutely loads of work was done on the web platform this year, but some of the highlights most relevant to Construct are:
- The AV1 video codec became widely supported - now being supported in all major browsers, albeit with hardware requirements for Safari. This was a motivation for us to improve video codec support in Construct with support for AV1.
- As new video and image formats take over, older ones have been retired - browsers that supported the ageing Theora video codec dropped support (and we removed it from Construct too), and Safari dropped support for the legacy JPEG2000 image format. This is a good thing to ensure old rarely-used features don't take up browser maker's development resources.
- Firefox was updated with some new web platform features bringing full support for Construct's Clipboard plugin, screen wake lock in the Platform Info plugin, and support for WebCodecs allowing for video exports from Construct Animate in Firefox.
- All supported browsers now finally support the WebM Opus audio format - and we're now in the process of removing our old WebAssembly Opus decoder that we used for years to cover browsers that didn't support it. We've been waiting over a decade for a single open audio format that all browsers support, and we're finally there! (Subject to one remaining Safari bug, but we've worked around that.)
- After many years of using Closure Compiler to minify JavaScript code, given its lack of maintenance lately we made the decision to switch to UglifyJS. These kinds of switches can be tricky to pull off but we're glad we did it, as it brings better support for modern JavaScript features like private properties.
- Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers like Edge) simplified permission prompts for accessing files. Now when saving to disk in Construct you can choose Allow on every visit in the file access permission prompt, and you won't be bothered with further permission prompts when accessing that file in future - even if you close and reopen the browser.
- Chrome now also supports recording the widely-supported MP4 H.264 video format - and so now Construct's Video Recorder plugin can record MP4 videos instead of WebM as it did previously, and now defaults to MP4 for best compatibility.
Blog posts
Some of the blog posts we published this year include:
Developer Diaries
Laura continued with some fascinating interviews with Construct developers in the Developer Diaries series. This year we had interviews with:
You can find more past entries by browsing blog posts with the developer-diaries tag. There's quite a few in the archives now!
Events
This year was great for Construct at events, both in games and in education. Starting off in January, the team headed to London for the annual Bett UK education show. Bett is always an amazing opportunity to show Construct to new people and to catch up with teachers and hear about how they’re using the engine with their students.
April saw Laura heading to WASD – a show with a focus on indie games and the venue for Digital Schoolhouse's Schools Esports Tournament Grand Final. After watching some brilliant Splatoon 3 gameplay, we got the opportunity to play some incredible indie games, and catch up with a few Construct developers on the show floor!
Our next stop was the Computer Science Teachers Association conference over in Las Vegas. CSTA is always a great time for the Construct team, between meeting more educators and catching up with our incredible Teacher Advisors out in the US. We partnered with one of our Teacher Advisors Estelle Ashman for the show with Estelle presenting a session on using Construct in the classroom.
August brought Gamescom in Cologne and Construct's first visit to the show! Laura caught up with another couple of developers using Construct for their games and you can read about her experience in the blog post Community catch up - Construct at Gamescom 2024.
EGX was the last event of the year for us, and while there weren't any Construct games on the show floor, it was still a good opportunity to meet up with some industry folk. It's not certain what the UK games event scene will look like in the coming years with EGX now a small part of MCM Comic Con and WASD being cancelled, so it's good to get to these events while we can.
Plus, we did a whole load of smaller education events getting Construct into the hands of teachers and students alike. It's always a blast seeing how Construct is used in the world of education!
More to come next year!
We've been working hard and had an extraordinarily productive year bringing you as many fantastic updates to Construct as we can possibly manage. It's taken a long time even just to list everything we got done this year! That's in large part thanks to the web platform, helping accelerate our development with a single codebase that runs on all platforms. However it is still not enough, and we shall not rest: there is more to be done, and we're going to keep working hard through 2025 to continue making Construct better. Don't forget there's also much more going on behind-the-scenes, including providing support, updating the website, maintaining services, and all the other admin and finance work involved in running a business. The team have done a great job this year and we'll be taking a well-earned break over the next couple of weeks for the winter holidays. Please note support will be limited during that time and it may take longer for us to get back to you, and beta releases will stop until early next year. We will be back to full steam ahead in early January. And if you want to take a trip down memory lane, you can also find our year-in-review blog posts from 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.