Does Appmobi & CocoonJS Deliver?

In 2013 they will charge something like 250$/month for a serious project.

$250 ? per month ? seriously ? <img src="smileys/smiley3.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Time like this I wish again and again that Construct 2 doesn't have to rely so much on 3rd party software to do its exporter.

While the progress of C2 itself is really fast (new feature & bug fix almost every 2 weeks), 3rd party exporter seems to take their own sweet time (which understandably because they have their own priority).

Look at how many times Ashley said to get in touch with Appmobi / Ludei / Awesomium team because a certain feature isn't yet implemented / not working correctly.

Also don't forget that each exporter will have their own pricing,

which probably in some kind of monthly/annually subscription plan instead of a one time pricing like Construct 2.

oh well... let's just wait another year and hope things will change for the better for us <img src="smileys/smiley41.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

nemo - where did you hear that? I don't believe Ludei have made any specific announcement yet, so I wouldn't speculate like that without a source.

tap - there are still bugs in DC that prevent even the stock Space Blaster demo displaying correctly. I think I emailed appMobi about it recently, are you going to update soon?

I went and searched, haven't found any proof or announcement regarding this $250/month claim.

Ashley

I went to Ludei's page and ended up into this pricing page, and there was a list of licences. Forget that 250$/month, cause now that I checked my notes, I think 98$/month was the cheapest to remove the splash and get some online stuff. I think it was exactly the same as iOS Developer cost/year.

They also did have a free licence.

Now I can't see the list anymore, it seems to be behind the "Free until 2013" Before pricing was listed under that message.

Now I'm not so sure I was supposed to see it. <img src="smileys/smiley3.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

That means that the pricing may change.

$98 a month is pretty extreme too IMO. Unless you meant per year? I think my next game I am going to try hard to go with AppMobi and see how it pans out. Maybe we can even get native admob support working with a plugin in appmobi :).

Stencyl offers pro $ 79 per year and iOS 149 per year.

If CocoonJS setup 250 per month is a totally steep, big crisis for independent developers

250� is an impossible price for any developer, anywhere. You'd be better off buying a development engine for each system, or buying something like GameMaker Studio with all the plugins and send Ludei on their way.

I'm not sure that is even an acceptable pricing, unless there would be an mighty impressive service behind.

Ashely - I know that issue is logged in our issue tracking system. I'm not sure as to the exact time frame but the DC team is aware and will work resolve it.

Many thanks Tap at Appmobi for clarify the MAU pricing. Eureka! I finally get it. That's pretty cool and the applab sounds awesome - no need to buy every mobile device before publishing.

Hey Nemo, i agree about the cocoon JS splash screen. It's ridiculous and a bad decision on their part. Far too invasive. A small logo would be better. Considering the very favourable pricing for C2 and other engines like Stencyl, it's a joke if third-party service providers try and exploit the large wannabe game developer base - like roofers putting their rates up in winter! Anyway, i've made up my mind. I'll be going with Appmobi when ready to publish. <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I tried thoroughly both solutions (for iOS), and in the end I decided to go with PhoneGap, as painful as it sounds.

Sadly both appmobi and cocoonjs doesn't support vital features of iOS (GameCenter, iAds and iAP) which can make a real difference in sales. As far as my experience goes, both solutions are good for amateurish games, if you want to package something vaguely professional you need to have the whole DOM at your fingertips and access to native features. Not even considering that with both of them you'll be battling with missing features or not working plugins (like spritefonts which are pretty vital). Also cocoonjs and appmobi are closed source and services depending on external infrastructure that may not exists in the future.

While both of them give a great performance boost they are not even remotely close to native performance which is a thing that has to be considered, if you want complete freedom you need to go native (or Stencyl).

This will be the last game I'll do with construct2 for mobile, I'm sorry but the technology isn't there by a long shot. Win8 is great, desktop is great but mobile lacks too many features and neither of those solutions are enough to cover the technology hole, that until WebGL gets integrated into webviews.

I say this because the time I lost testing those platform, optimizing the code I could've done a way better game with another engine, think about what you are doing really really carefully to avoid investing time and resources only to see an unplayable mess as a result.

0plus1

CocoonJS isn't ready to use production until 2013, its features are:

Ad network integration. There are multiple services that allows integration with some of the main ad networks in both iOS and Android platforms to show banner, interstitial and video ads.

In App Purchases (IAP). There are services for both iOS and Android IAP support.

Analytics. Cocoon supports app tracking via third party SDKs or even server to server management.

Multiplayer infrastructure. We already have both GameCenter support for iOS devices and our own backend infrastructure.

Online resource update. Our applications can update their resources (images, sounds, texts, configuration files) online without having to create a new app version.

Access to device hardware specific features like the camera and the GPS.

Joannesalfa

I guess I'll take a second look, still those technologies doesn't convince me, they are too tied and restrictive, and last time I checked iAP where a different service, not the native ones.

I'll take a look at it for the next game, meanwhile thanks, I was some month behind me thinks..

Joannesalfa

I guess I'll take a second look, still those technologies doesn't convince me, they are too tied and restrictive, and last time I checked iAP where a different service, not the native ones.

I'll take a look at it for the next game, meanwhile thanks, I was some month behind me thinks..

0plus1 where did you check iAP? i'm premium member of CocoonJS cloud and i couldn't find where to link Product ID.

While both of them give a great performance boost they are not even remotely close to native performance which is a thing that has to be considered, if you want complete freedom you need to go native (or Stencyl).

I agree with this. I've only tested CocoonJS but the performance increase was next to nothing. I was expecting native performance but got basically the same performance I get in Safari on an iPad.

I'm going to give appMobi a try tomorrow, hopefully... but from the sound of it, I shouldn't be expecting much improvement there either.

It's really disappointing that Construct 2 doesn't have a way to just export natively to mobile devices. I know HTML5 is "the future" but right now it's pretty terrible for mobile platforms. I don't see Apple allowing webGL ever, as it would directly affect their own app sales, since people could just circumvent the app store and host their own games without Apple getting it's 30% cut.

So basically unless some miracle occurs, don't expect to release heavy HTML5 games to any iOS device because they just won't run at playable speeds. Without hardware acceleration, games have to be pretty simple and light.

Will CocoonJS will be out of beta on Jan 2013 and available for everyone to use all the features, do we have any dates ? i am hoping at least during that time we can get some decent support , right now it seems they are purposely not supporting certain features like simple AJAX , XML , etc and don't want to give away a lot free. <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />