New Construct Arcade Has Landed

21
Official Construct Post
Tom's avatar
Tom
  • 14 Aug, 2019
  • 575 words
  • ~2-4 mins
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We're pleased to announce the beta version of the new Construct Arcade has landed! You can go and visit the arcade here: construct.net/en/free-online-games

The new arcade has a host of new features and improvements. We've also imported a lot of the games on the Scirra Arcade over to the new arcade.

Help! Where are my games?

If you login and visit construct.net/en/free-online-games/published-games you'll see any games that have been ported to the new arcade. Update: May 2020 If your games are not there, the period for porting them over has now lapsed. You will need to upload them again to the new arcade.

Improvements & New Features

Layout

New improved layout and categorisation which is also mobile friendly. When viewing on a mobile, it will also default the filter to only show mobile enabled games.

Scalability

The new arcade is hosted in the cloud which means it will be far more stable than the previous Scirra Arcade. We've had issues with the previous arcade where our web-servers couldn't cope very well with large bursts of traffic. We're carefully monitoring performance and are now able to add new resources on demand.

The new arcade should also respond and perform significantly faster than the previous arcade.

Embedding

Our embedding code has been simplified to one iframe tag. The embed itself also has the functionality to share, view instructions and go full screen. It also keeps you logged in if you have a Construct.net account ensuring your high scores (when this feature become available) are recorded no matter what site you're playing the game from.

Publisher Profiles

Your publisher profile allows you to link to your social media accounts and add contact information. A central location to view all your published games.

My Games Centre

Your published and unpublished games are all easily viewable at a glance for the new my games centre. Get a snap shot of how many plays and likes your games are getting.

Unlike the previous arcade, the new arcade now also supports the C3 runtime.

Analytics

You can enter a Google Analytics account ID in your global settings page. This will track plays and some events when players play your games.

Improved Privacy Controls

You can disable and enable lots of features on a per-game level. Disable or enable comments, ratings, stats. There are also 3 types of privacy for your games:

  1. Public - Anyone can play and find your games
  2. Private - Only usernames or IP addresses you specify can play your game
  3. Private via URL - The game wont appear in listing or searches and will have a random URL you can distribute. Anyone with this URL can play the game. You are also able to regenerate this URL whenever you want.

Much Easier Uploading

We realised asking for an image exactly 400x350px in size was annoying at times! Our new arcade allows any image at least that size and allows you to crop it to wherever you want.

App Store Links

Add links to your game in app stores. If you're uploading a demo game, this can be a great way to try to convert those plays into sales.

Coming Next

  • Implementing search
  • Game jams feature allowing us to easily run competitions
  • Return of leader-boards and achievements
  • Private arcades for our educational customers, allowing a safe and private place for your students games to be played and hosted from

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  • Looks good so far. Did you though about a system to "detect crap" withing game uploads? I mean, we all know history like to repeat itself and it's matter of time we'll have 100's of Ghost shooter and other example/tutorials upload just because...

    Any system to prevent that?

      • [-] [+]
      • 2
      • Tom's avatar
      • Tom
      • Construct Team Founder
      • 2 points
      • (0 children)

      Very hard to filter, I've added game types (tests, works in progress, demos and full games). Default view on the arcade only shows demos and full games, should filter a lot of the lower quality content out.

  • Very nice to see the improvements and redesign! Any plans to enable monetization possibilities? Construct community is sorely in need of a way to make money from web games. Not something "with some coding.." developer able solutions, but something any competent Construct user could utilize. It may be as simple as video rewarded ads / ad / banners.. or maybe "Construct Bucks"? :)

      • [-] [+]
      • 5
      • Tom's avatar
      • Tom
      • Construct Team Founder
      • 5 points
      • (2 children)

      Something we've talked about internally. Not something we're able to offer right now but are thinking about options.

      • It would be cool to have Construct partner with online merchants like Paypal or Stripe leading the premium web games market.

      • totally understood.. i know Ashley has pushed back on this some, but could you make a Kongregate plugin? His response was "Kongregate could do it" but i've tried them and i don't see any traction happening there, but for the good of your platform and the community, giving us an option like that would be a pretty fair compromise right? you wouldn't have to get your hands dirty with processing payments or persistent user data and they have a mature API so I would imagine making the hooks to work would not be a heavy development task.

        It's not a perfect solution, but it would give us a real option for making robust web games that could be effectively monetized.

  • Everything looks nice, thanks for bringing it back!

    Only suggestion I would give is to include a "dark mode" in the future. Every game portal that isn't already dark by default, has an option to switch between modes and it's also becoming more popular on the web in general.

    If this is too complex to add for the time being, a simple "dim" mode (which is basically just a dark overlay), would be cool too. It could appear whenever the game canvas is in focus.

  • This is incredible work. Specifically calling out the ability to show off demos and link to stores seems small but is brilliant. Wonderful set of updates.

  • congrats to scirra team and to Tom, nice arcade! finally a usable modern interface for the old arcade i love it :D especially the menu in left side amazing stuff.

  • Thank you for this awesome website!

  • Amazing!

  • Great news! Very happy to see the arcade back, and loving all the new features - fantastic work Tom! Guess I'd better get to uploading some games :)

  • This is really amazing !! Thank you construct team !!

  • Looks very neat, congrats! I would suggest to reserve its own URL for the Arcade like constructarcade.com or whatever. That way it will be easier to find for people who just want to play games and not develop them and also be less confusing :)

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