Moving on from Construct Q

I was a user of the original Construct, and an early adopter of C2. So imagine how happy I was to hear of a more powerful C3! Since I did not need it right away I wait to check out if there would be a Black Friday Special. But was shocked to see the new rent to own pricing structure.

I know big companies like MS and Adobe are moving in the subscription direction but as we see not everyone is going along with them. A great example is Affinity Photo. It is just as good as Photoshop (better in some areas) and the sales show that not everyone is on-board with the big boys. I do pro photo-work for magazines and no one even noticed I switched.

I mainly used C2 as a recreation tool and give away some of the little games to a children's center. So the $100/year is out of the question. That said I am looking for a replacement. What do you guys suggest? Something to make a nice games with out coding form scratch. i have used GameMaker in the past with great success so I am leaning that way, but would like you opinion on other options.

Thanks

I suggest anything at all. There are lots of game making software out there, maybe start trying them out and see. Also don't be afraid of something that requires coding, instead consider it on a case by case basis. Visual scripting like events are in some ways simpler and in some ways more complicated than actual coding. Also there are coding languages that are bonkers complicated and other that are simple to learn and use.

A few popular ones with good visual editors are clickteam fusion, gamemaker, stencyl, and godot. Then there are big engines like unreal, unity, lumberyard, cyengine, etc... but eh.

You could always try other things like blender game engine, zgameeditor, pico8, love2d, scratch, alice, etc...

Thanks R0J0hound, I can, code. Like when I used Gamemaker it was just the code mode. Nice list though and lots to check out. Many thanks

Good luck with C3, it is just no longer a solution for me.

BTW I am a very good blender artist, but never tried the game engine. Is it good?

Godot has lots of neat stuff going on. It's almost the opposite direction development wise, with Construct starting from html5 rather than a C variant.

It's easy to say that they should have gone that direction, but the truth is the tech just didn't match up like it does now.

There's two options for the web, Emscripten, but at a heavy price in download, then there's Web Assembly, but I have no idea how well that plays with Webview.

And the whole code thing... eww.

I don't use C3. I actually want to get away from web technologies.

Blender engine is supposedly out of date, and looks to be eventually removed from blender, but I think it's easy enough to use and it's cool to have all the tools in blender at your fingertips. I don't actually make any games, I've just fiddled around with most of those apps.

Events are like coding, just sometimes more complicated and esoteric.

TY Newt. I will check that out,

R0J0hound - Nicely put. LOL Going to miss your helpful input and wonderful plugin's Wishing you the best

Godot is the best looking free/open source engine I see right now. Otherwise, for commercial (and console) goals I recommend Unity for 2D and Unreal Engine 4 for 3D.

I say for commercial reasons because if you want something dependable and already exporting to consoles, you're going to have an easier time with Unity/UE4.

Godot is getting visual scripting soon.

Unity has some great visual scripting options like PlayMaker and PlyGame/PlyBlox, but honestly C# is not hard to learn at all (easier than Java in my opinion)

Also a super worthy mention:

Clickteam MultiMedia Fusion 2.5, it may look like it's still living in the 1990's but it works well (especially the runtime, it's native and runs fast! the editor is sadly more clunky interface than Construct, otherwise I never would have switched away from it haha), isn't a subscription, and is the program that Construct was borrowing from when Ashley left making plugins for MMF to make Scirra. It even has console export through Chowdren plugin.

MultiMedia Fusion 3 is in development and should work even better.

That Affinity Photo program looks pretty cool. It's good to see there are other alternatives to the subscription-based software (I think there always will be alternatives).

I've tried various tools, but Construct2 seems to be the most intuitive for me despite it's flaws.

Though, sometimes I wish to just go the code route.

I'm sticking with C2 for now.

Clickteam MultiMedia Fusion 2.5, it may look like it's still living in the 1990's but it works well (especially the runtime, it's native and runs fast!

FWIW I saw a Bunnymark benchmark recently that Construct 2 in Chrome outperformed Fusion 2.5's native runtime. Native doesn't mean fast, and HTML5 doesn't mean slow. The C3 runtime will be even faster too.

I do not understand what the execution time means.

Does it mean faster when running a game or something?

Does it mean that the game requires less CPU resources ?.

If you like framework maybe try this http://kha.tech/

If you looking for construct 1+2 alternative or clone maybe try http://compilgames.net/

If you interested with new 3d game engine maybe try http://armory3d.org/index.html

Its not free though and it is not based on bge (blender game engine) , this is a totally new game engine. I don't even bother to open unity or ue4 anymore because I'm having so much fun with it.

R0J0hound , how about you take a look at Armory3d.

Still, after all this years with Construct 2, Im still impressed that Ashley still openly allowed discussion with competitor game engines. But I still hate that C3 is a subscription based payment and not one time payment..

Still, after all this years with Construct 2, Im still impressed that Ashley still openly allowed discussion with competitor game engines. But I still hate that C3 is a subscription based payment and not one time payment..

I think it's good of him. I spent some time on clickteam forums and they delete a lot of posts whenever speaking of other competitors, and it just made them appear insecure and unprofessional in my opinion. So, by comparison, Ashley and the Scirra team appear more confident in their product, which makes me feel more comfortable with it. Sometimes I get frustrated with how Scirra responds to feature requests and stuff, but ultimately they know what is best for them, and I am just one person, so I need to keep reminding myself to be cool about it.

We've always been confident enough in the strengths of Construct to allow discussion of other tools. Tom even blogged about it, right back in the early days when Construct 2 was pretty limited compared to now, and we still had the same view: https://www.scirra.com/blog/62/removing-mentionsdiscussion-on-competitors

I think in the past we've drawn a line if someone says something literally along the lines of "nobody should buy C2/C3, everybody should go buy X instead!" which I generally see as just trolling, but other than that we generally don't mind. Obviously we are going to defend the strengths of Construct, but we're not going to pretend we're the only option.

While I intend to keep working in 2d with another program, you guys may want to check this out for 3d development.

I used to do 3d for a living with 3ds max and a little Maya. My work extended to a popular cola product and mouse, but I switched to Blender since I no longer have a company paying the fees. Anyway the new blender that will be out in 2018 is going to be a stunning 3d game work environment. The new 3d tools with boning, animation and auto unwrap are going to be stellar. I may give it a spin to even try a 2d game in this to get an amazing look that other 2d can't do.

https://www.blender.org/features/

must see preview:

Guyon , If not mistaken BGE currently does not have any new official development. Blender 2.8 eevee awesome renderer is on the viewport only. If you want pbr in bge , you have to look at upbge https://upbge.org/

Also new armory3d video for you guys..