Construct Animate feedback thread

We've launched a public beta of a new animation product Construct Animate! Read more about it in the announcement blog post: https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1/announcing-new-product-beta-1589

For now we're creating this thread to post feedback. So if you have any thoughts, let us know here!

Please make vector shape tweening happens with cue point to modify. Also dedicated image editor should be given more features.

As soon as we get some workflow polish, this can be a great After Effects competitor (there is no decent one in the market atm, btw). I've been animating in AE for 10 years and the best thing it has is fluidity of use in the UI. If you ever need it, I'd love to test dev builds, do live testing and give feedback along the way.

I could get very particular about this if you guys would find it useful, but I'll leave these simple but ESSENTIAL points; I believe no animator would take a keyframe-based program seriously without them:

-The MOST important thing is you should be able to drag the cursor to make a selection area, this is vital for keyframe management.

-Dragging a keyframe should select it and move with the cursor. Right now it makes a duplicate when you drop it with values that have no apparent correlation, and undoing does not erase them.

-Shortcuts for adding properties when an object is selected (pressing A adds Angle property, T for Transparency as it's closer to the left hand than O for Opacity, S for both Scales [X and Y], W/H for Width and Height...)

-Autokeyframing (toggleable) ON by default (when you drag an object and are in a moment in time that has no position data, add new keyframes and position data automatically. Same applies for angle and size)

-Buttons for going to the first/last frame, keyframe skipping only is not enough.

-"." and "," or left/right arrow keys should move frame by frame.

-Ctrl+D for duplicating any currently selected keyframes one frame forward, overwriting the former if there is any. Essential for timing and pre-posing.

Complex to implement but ESSENTIAL on the long run:

-Scrubbing the cursor should update the view dynamically so you can instantly see how it's looking. If this is implemented, clicking on a keyframe should not bring the time cursor to that point, it should only select that keyframe and update the properties panel.

-Double clicking on a keyframe should bring up a easing editor, same as editing it on the layout directly but on a linear timeline with precise scales/rules (see After Effect's implementation). I can't express how important this is for any animator.

Server rendering.

You should think about making it free to C3 subscribers since you are essentially using limited dev time and subscriber money to develop and maintain it.

I think Construct Animate would greatly benefit from animated SVG, and drawing tools that would allow you to draw vector images directly onto the layout whilst in the layout view. Also tweening SVG images would be an amazing feature!

Tween animation is great within Constuct, but it should definitely consider the type of animators that hand-draw.

I don't have any suggestions, but I do compare Construct Animate to Flash, and I understand that many animators loved Flash since you just simply "draw, then keyboard shortcut for a new frame" repeat these 2 steps over and over, maybe drawing on a separate layer here and there. Quick and easy. Construct doesn't work like this, so it's more about adding sprites and positioning them and tweening, rather than painting a picture with some drawing tools and then adding a new frame and continuing to draw.

Another way to think of it: Sprite's are like Symbols in Flash. Some animators didn't use Symbols, as the animator simply drew their animation using only layers and frames.

So yeah, I would imagine some animators would feel it is too methodical to do ALL of the drawing as separate sprite objects. And too long-winded to have to import your drawings from another software. Other software would offer direct drawing capabilities. I think Krita is free and offers animation along with brilliant drawing tools, but it's only raster animation.

I think Construct Animate has the potential to be something really powerful!

When announcing Animate, the blog mentioned that this could be used also for animated objects for course creation.

On that subject, can Animate do the same as CreateStudio can do?

Post a possible roadmap. It is not clear at this time why this should replace C3. Do they differ only in export to video?

I mentioned this briefly in the comments, but in case it gets lost there, I think you'll have to be very careful around feature-locking.

Naturally the business appeal of 'suites' is the potential for both new users and more revenue from existing users. But the failure of many suites/brand families/etc is holding features hostage behind products.

We're only seeing a sliver of the plans for Animate, but so far it does include this. Locking Export to Video behind Animate only makes sense from a business perspective. Asking C3 users to pay extra won't go over well with those who currently use C3 for any animation, and with the community on principle (since Animate is just Construct and there's no barrier to porting the feature.)

It's a fine line that will need good communication to manage. In this case, it does seem like buying Photoshop just to save my Illustrator file as a JPG.

That aside, I truly love how Construct has opened the doors to development for so many people, and I hope Animate brings more animators into the world.

How will Scirra handle a situation where a 3rd party Construct 3 addon is providing the same functionality that's suppose to be exclusive to Construct Animate?

Right now the only real distinguishing factor between C3 and CA is the video exporter, lets say that theoretically someone creates a 3rd party addon that provides the same functionality.

Will that be okay, or will Scirra cripple the C3 asset store to protect sales of their own competing product?

What happens if the 3rd party C3 addon is better than the feature in CA?

Please correct me if wrong, but this is already one of the smallest teams that supports the development of a commercial game engine that I know of, and not a cheap one to afford for the matter.

While it had its benefits years back, there are already sentiments and concerns about resources and business models not scaling up fast enough, thus affecting the product roadmap shifting from a performant commercial 2D game engine to an education centric tool, to adding limited 3d features and more, while some are still hoping for the 2D engine to become more robust to support years long projects in the making, often ported from previous versions of the product.

From a product market delivery perspective, the product roadmap is not really clear to early adopters who were hoping the subscription model would push C2 to the next performance level, so it can scale better for larger games and releases that were in the making for the previous years, but ended up shifting its go-to-marketing focus to different verticals. This is where another product should have seen the light instead of making it part of the early offering and blur the initial messaging.

Now Scirra is launching a second product. Even if smaller in terms of scope than the game engine and without disclosing private business strategies, is it fair to ask Scirra about its plan to reassure its customers and qualm the fears of a slowdown in the development of the game engine, which had always been its sole focus in the past?

Please understand that I am not coming from an angry place, I sank thousands of hours of my life into Scirra's offering and regret very little about my time with it. My bad for still sticking around while I also could just walk away. If anything, these concerns come from a place of love for a product that I just hope can become better to a point devs would consider it for larger releases, knowing there is support, tried and tested features that support the end development stages of game development and a executive commitment behind it, to decide to foresee using Construct as a solution.

On a side note, there is no lack of initiatives that could help it, such as professional services, developer support or focusing development on features that meet these goals, but instead it seems as if there also was a lot of time spent into developing features that attract newcomers, but deviated from the original promises of the engine as a product in my opinion. Again, that is just my opinion and this is a free market and up to me to learn to use other tools, but in that case, a little more transparency on the roadmap of the company now that the company is more than one product would help.

Much love