<img src="http://www.scirra.com/images/c2cog.png"><img src="http://www.scirra.com/images/html5.png">
Overview
Welcome to the Construct 2 public preview! Development was previously done privately, and we're moving to public development now, for broader feedback and testing. Please get involved! If you're wondering what will happen to the old Construct, you probably haven't read this yet.
New features in Construct 2
There are a lot of changes and new features in C2. The big news is that it primarily exports to HTML5. The changes are outlined in this thread.
State of development
This public preview is effectively a pre-alpha. C2 does not yet have much capability - the demo below is very simple and it is difficult to make anything much more complicated than that. C2 is currently defined more by what it doesn't have than what it has - there are no private variables, behaviors, event groups, event includes, families, very few plugins with very few actions, conditions and expressions, no image editor, animations, and so on. If something's missing, it's just that we haven't got there yet. (0.x was around a quarter of a million lines of code.) Our approach to development has been to get to some useful functionality as quickly as possible - dropping as many features as possible along the way to make it quicker - then to fill out functionality from there. For example, event groups are useful, but most people can get by without them, so they were dropped to free up time for essential, unmissable features. Obviously they'll get added in the end, it's just a lower priority!
However, we hope to expand C2 rapidly. You can build similar simple "toy" games, and if you're creative you can use some hacks (like storing variables in object's positions!) to make some more complicated games right now, but it's hard work!
Some useful feedback would be the essential features that you're really struggling to get by without. I have private variables next on the agenda, since I presume it's incredibly limiting not having them.
Download
Forum threads will be posted to this forum for new releases. (I'm not linking to one here because it'll go out of date pretty quick!)
Demo
You can preview a really simple test of a HTML5 game made in the current build here. The .capx for it can be downloaded here. Note: you'll need a HTML5 compatible browser! The latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari are compatible, but Internet Explorer 8 isn't. However, it also works in Internet Explorer 9 which actually has the best canvas support right now!
Documentation & Known Issues
A list of known issues can be found here - please don't report these as bugs, we know about them already. There is not currently any documentation - there are help links in the program, but there hasn't been any documentation written for them to link to. We'll set up a wiki at some point for the links to point to.
Feedback & bug reports
The whole point of this preview is to get feedback, so please let us know what you think! Whether you especially like something or especially dislike something, do let us know - both positive and negative feedback is valuable. Feel free to post threads in this forum with your thoughts, suggestions, ideas or anything else you want to say.
Developers
You can extend Construct 2 with Javascript! Find out more here.
Get involved
Even if you're not a developer, there's still loads you can do to help out with the project! We'll be posting some ideas for the community to get involved with Construct 2's development shortly.
Thanks!
Thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy trying out Construct 2, as limited as it may be! I'd also like to say thanks to Mary Jane who's done the new logo and our front-page C2 splashes, and Davo who's done a few bits and pieces and came up with the new design for the event sheet editor. Also, the HTML5 logo is the sort-of-official one from W3.