Should I buy Construct 2

First of all, let me say that I'm finding Construct 2 to be pretty amazing. Even with the free version I've developed an app in a matter of days that would have taken me months in the other programming languages I know. Secondly, the help and support on the forums has been great. Within hours of posting, I'm getting my problems fixed.

But now, the time has come to make a decision. I've reached the 100 event limit and have to decide if it's time to purchase or look elsewhere. So here's the questions in my head that I don't have answers for and maybe you can help me decide.

1. I'm looking to make apps, not necessarily games. And I'm finding that pretty easy going. So, the question is, how easy is it to take a Construct 2 app and port it over to say Android and iOS. I have no experience with that and looking at things like XDK confuse me.

2. I understand Construct 3 is in the works. If I purchase now, am I going to have to purchase again when 3 comes out. I've got shafted before buying an IDE and a month later a new version came out with gobs of new features and I got no free upgrade. *Edit* I just found the post where it said there would be a discount to upgrade but it was from back in January. So I'm wondering now if the 'long way off' for Construct 3 is still a long way off.

3. I understand some publishers refuse apps made with Construct. While I don't at present plan on going through them, it would be nice to know if I get hard up for cash that I can create a game quickly and sell it. Is it common for publishers to refuse Construct apps and why? Is their reasoning something I need to be aware of when independently releasing my own apps?

4. Doing my homework, I've looked at a few other app IDE's like GDevelop. While it's amazingly similar to Construct, I like the workflow in Construct much better. It makes sense. But, the price tag of GDevelop is much more appealing. I've also looked at some of the negative reviews of Construct to see where the 'aggravation' factor comes in. My question therefore is, from those of you who have been using Construct for some time, rate the amount of aggravation you experience with Construct and if you can, compare that to other IDE's.

Those are the questions right off the top of my head. I'll probably have more.

1: After learning how to use XDK (it's just confusing for the first time), it gets really easy. I have 2 projects for Android and for the second I set up XDK for it in 5 minutes. Also, submitting and getting a build only takes a few minutes. So I'd say, it's not hard at all. If you want to use some plugins, you may have to dig deeper, but nothing too serious in my opinion.

2: Construct 3 is a long way off. No one on the forums has any idea when will it come out. There is no release date yet. So, don't plan on holding back you purchase because of C3. You may have to wait a year or more.

3: I have no experience in selling my games to publishers, but I'm interested in the answers too.

4: What do you mean by "aggravation factor"?

4: What do you mean by "aggravation factor"?

Thanks for you opinion glerikud. One of my fears, since I can't test it in the free version, was that getting apps out the door and onto Google Play, Facebook, etc. was going to be something akin to a nightmare. I'm reading all sorts of scary wordings that require plugins or other programs with inherent bugs just to get published. While I do program in several languages, java is not one of them. I've been concerned after browsing the forums that I was going to have to start debugging someone else's code (which I loathe doing) in order to get published.

And I suppose that relates to the aggravation factor as well. Recently I've been working with Unity and scripting in C# (modding for another game) and while I've been at it for several months, trying to comprehend some of the really obscure ways Unity works is... well... aggravating (like a quaternion and vector math and the Unity API in general not to mention it's mind boggling interface.) So I guess my ultimate question here is: from creating a new project to seeing the first $1 come in, how many times am I going to facedesk?

The truth is, that you have to be absolutely positively sure that you need a HTML5 engine and not something else.

All the 'apps' that we publish to iOS and Android are wrapped HTML5. Not native. This is enough for a lot of things, but brings along some special circumstances. If this is good enough for your use case is something that only you can answer I'm afraid.

The exports are relying on 3rd party tools and wrappers, and monetization (iAP, ads) do so, too.

So you have to ask yourself the following questions:

• Is HTML5 good enough for your purposes? (to find that out test your apps within browsers on the phones, the results are comparable to what you might get once they are wrapped/exported/packaged). Without these tests no one can know. This can be done with the free edition.
• Are you comfortable keeping up with a 3rd party environment of plugins and build tools? This changes often. One week it works, the next week it's all broken, the week after it works again but with a different workflow and all tutorials are invalid. This is especially true for ads and iap. This is also something that the C2 vendors cannot really fix. You have to do a lot of research yourself.

I found that 90% of the problems people rant about on the forum can be traced back to the fact that a HTML5 engine was a suboptimal way to go for what they had in mind.

I think the best advice is to compare what you can't do with it, to what you can.

Thanks for the opinions Eisenhaus. At the moment, I only have one project in mind that I need to create. It's an standalone app version of a piece of shareware I have. While there are some limitations, I've already done some extreme testing and I'm confident that HTML5 will work for my purposes (I turned a 65 million pixel object into a bullet). So that's not an issue.

As far as keeping up with plugins... I'll just say I wished people who write code were just as good at writing documentation for their code. But yea, I'm only too familiar with googling 'fixes' and 'updates' to API's and plugins, but that's an expected aggravation.

Once I get that first project out the door then I may turn to other things, like games, and then I may run into HTML5 limitations. But I've been programming for over 30 years (I started with Pascal on a PDP 11/70 with 4mb ram) and if there's one axiom in programming I've learned: when you run into a language limitation you either a. find a way to fake it or b. do without it.

Those who buy C2 and purchase C3 will get a discount off of C3. Construct 2 is good, really good and is not a cookie cutter game engine. It has its limits but it's a great engine!

I agree Usman. I'm liking it so far. While waiting for opinions on this thread I'm testing out browser scaling on my android. As I mentioned, one of my big concerns (which was somewhat alleviated by an earlier reply) is that what I'm seeing as easy now will become much more difficult once I purchase C2 and try to deploy what I've created.

So I guess my ultimate question here is: from creating a new project to seeing the first $1 come in, how many times am I going to facedesk?

Most of the problems you'll face will be with the 3rd party wrappers. After you learn some special cases about Construct 2 (like how loops work within it), then the editor won't be a stress factor (just keep your code clean and organised as possible).

99% of us never finish a game, chances are you will never finish your game.

So pick whatever development environment you think will most likely get you to finish.

Run time, HTML5, Language, and Cost are not relevent unless you finish.

For those who are curious as to my decision...

I purchased C2.

Thanks for the advice.

For those who are curious as to my decision...

I purchased C2.

Thanks for the advice.

I don't think you'll regret it. Happy developing

Yay!!!

Have fun!