During the last three - six months a good friend and I have been working relentlessly on game design and have come up with what we feel are some fairly solid game designs.
To give some perspective, we are both close to our early thirties and are the stereotypical nerds and gamers like so many from our generation. We are also realistic. We have children and families and understand the amount of frustration, time, and work that goes in to game creation.
We have no blind ambitions about 3d game design yet, and really want to recreate the 2d nostalgic feel from the games that we grew up while combining new and original ideas to enhance them.
We wanted to create games that others can enjoy, it is just what we have always wanted to do and love doing it.
With that said:
We started our first real endeavour and chose XNA as our platform. We are both full time students, he is going for computer science and I switched from CS to opt for an IT degree. Using what spare time we have we have dumped hours upon hours over nearly half a year now trying to realize our vision. Now we find out that XNA is most likely not going to be heading in the direction it has been etc. Not only that the software we are writing will only run on windows or xbox.
I found all of this incredibly frustrating. I have been following construct nearly since it started and loved it. I enjoyed mostly lurking in the forums reading about how people felt about the software. I especially am blown away by the involvement of the development individuals with the community.
Last week I decided to try the free edition and port the game we are working on to it somewhat, literally just for fun to see how it would look. I knew it would not be able to handle all of the drawing and the way we are implementing our game and that it would slow to a screeching halt. After all, web games lack the power and complexity to compete with EXE type games.
How wrong was I. After throwing together a prototype in two days using extra free time I made up from digging in to my sleep schedule (you know you all do it to) I found that the game runs perfectly fine. In fact I stress tested it with random generation and drew 5400+ objects. Granted I am still a newbie to this, I am very impressed.
This morning I purchased construct 2 and I just wanted to share my story with anyone else that has even remotely considered working with construct 2. Products like game maker make getting the message out regarding this powerful software more difficult as it is just assumed it is unable to handle any serious indie game development.
To the devs: Thank you for working so hard to bring an unbelievably professional looking and powerful tool to the hands of what I can guess is many like my friend and myself. People have wonderful ideas and should not be limited to express them, and this gives them the opportunity to pursue ideas as well as dreams.