Hopefully the mods don't have anything against bumping a thread a year old, but I got an email about a Construct 2 update the other day (yes, I still update C2 even if I don't use it) so I decided to check out how things have changed in a year.
I'm quite impressed. I believe Scirra has taken a lot of good steps toward increasing community engagement through their online store. Here's what I would like to see site-wise:
- Better store listing. Right now it defaults to best-selling, which tends to favor items with flashier icon/image. It should default to average customer review, but the algorithm should also take into account the number of reviews given. I'm not sure if it does that already, but if it doesn't then one review that is 5 stars would be enough to bump up the item to the top.
- Split the 'How Do I...?' forum into subforums or make a 'How Do I...?' category with forums separated by topic. The 'How Do I...?' forum has always been a discombobulated mess of people bumping their posts to the top because everything is under one roof. Some people are more knowledgeable in some topics than in others, and it hurts both the topic creator and the possible helper by centralizing everything in one place. Not to mention the bumping issue I touched on earlier.
For the developers themselves or possibly a very proficient C2 developer hired by Scirra:
- Project tutorials. Right now we have .capx examples, but those aren't really tutorials. While it's easy to argue that C2 is very beginner-friendly, developing a project from start to finish involves a lot of learning that goes beyond the simple C2 UI and messing around with things. Take a look at the Unity tutorial page (http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules) and you'll see the same topics separated by category that C2 has, except at the top there are Projects that take a new user from zero experience to a completed game. People learn differently - some prefer the mass of topics and tutorials that teach specific parts, while others want to just dive into a tutorial that creates a game from scratch, uses best practices, and teaches neat tips or tricks. Pardon me if some of these tutorials exist already, but if they do then the tutorial section of the site needs to be reworked to include an easy link to these near the top.
What I'd like to see from the community:
- Less platformer templates/games with source on the asset store and more 'modules' that pertain to other genres (an example would be a shooter sprite with basic events controller for movement + shooting). Don't get me wrong - competition is great, and there are a few platformer templates on there that seem really good (I haven't tried any so I cannot verify they are actually good), but what I'd like to see is one or two de facta 'best' platformer templates instead of the 'here to make a quick buck' ones that plague the store at the moment. This might be an exaggeration, but that's my takeaway from things.
Honestly, I haven't used C2 for about 2 years now and don't have plans to return. But I love C2 and will always be watching how the product and community evolves, so hopefully Scirra takes my suggestions into consideration. One thing I really like is the multiplayer server addition they added - it seems to be very unique since C2 is primarily an event-based engine that doesn't require a programming language. I've never seen a multiplayer system in a non-coding engine, so I wonder about how optimized the multiplayer server can be, but I think this is a good start. Perhaps in the future we'll have server variants on the store for purchase and tinkering, such as a real-time optimized version and a turn-based optimized version. Obviously this is just a face-value evaluation of the system based on a light skim of the multiplayer description, but hopefully Scirra has some better ideas in mind on how to expand on this.