The Power of Construct Classic?

Hello ladies & gentlemen.

First of all, I love Construct Classic. In my very personal opinion, it beats the .... out of GameMaker. But anyway, regardless of opinions and whatnot I came to ask an important question before I truly start my project.

Is Construct Classic powerful as an engine?

By powerful, I mean, capable of displaying graphics like Braid or Shank. And featuring gameplay like those games. I have yet to see a game of such high caliber done with Construct.

Yet, I have seen games like Legend of Princess and Iconoclasts, that while graphically are inferior than the games listed before, gameplay-wise are amazing.

I've been trying XNA as well, and while I do have programming experience, it's impossible to deny everything takes 90000 hours more on coding than using an already polished engine. Why reinvent the wheel?

So before I choose between Construct or XNA (or other alternative) could someone please guide me about the limitations, downsides and other things to consider about making a Metroid-like platformer on Construct (with pretty 2D sprites)?

Construct Classic is as powerful as your machine can run + Direct X 9, so it's pretty powerful.

On my machine I tend to find XNA games are slower for me, but on newer hardware I guess you'll find XNA better, especially since it's multiplatform (Xbox, PC, Phone?).

If you want to make an awesome looking game, but aren't expecting it to run on a 10 year old machine/graphics card on max settings, then it's definitely do-able in both XNA and CC. So it's more a question of which you know best/will get the game done faster for you.

yea those two games should 100% be possible in CC!

I wouldn't say they're graphically inferior; they're completely different types of graphics.

And yes.

I wouldn't say they're graphically inferior; they're completely different types of graphics.

And yes.

I know 'inferior' is not the proper word, sorry.

What I meant was lower-resolution, therefore smaller in memory size as well.

The only main bad thing about Construct for me at the moment is that the games don't run on Mac.

The main limitations of CC are: You must have the latest version of DirectX 9 installed, not just 10, but we haven't seen any issues having both installed.

Then another is hardware acceleration, or rather the limitations with vram. While its great for multiple small instances, large textures simply eat it up, so a great deal of planning is in order.

You can't just pile on megabytes and expect great results.

I would say dealing with the quirks of the program is an issue, as I hear that repeated quite often, but the fact is you'd have stuff like that in any language, or engine.

Whats the alternative to vram?

MORE VRAM D:

Also, Construct is capable of making some pretty good looking games, as long as you spend the time making the graphics.

Like any language or game making utility, how good you make things is really limited by yourself. As long as you adhere to certain limitations (like newt has already mentioned), which is the same for any development platform anyway... then there is no reason why the next Metal Slug or whatever couldn't be made in Construct.

I believe that konjak, the author of Noitu Love and Noitu Love 2 had some good things to say about Construct HERE.

~Sol

FYI: Legend of princess is mmf2, Iconoclasts is construct.

Both those games are what Construct's runtime was designed to do; high quality, HLSL shader enhanced graphics. The logic system is also extremely good and encourages a fast workflow.

The only downsides to Construct are minor runtime (specifically crashing when changing layout, which can be worked around) and edittime (crashes in the editor) instabilities . Also, your games can ONLY run on windows with classic.

Thank you all very much for all your feedback. Even without the Mac support I'm going with Construct.

I just played Blot (found on the Creations forum).

scirra.com/forum/blot-gravity-platformer_topic44776.html

That game pretty much summed it up. Go play it if you haven't. :P

I'm still undecided which program I should use for my next project which I'm eager to start, Construct Classic is perfect for the games I want to make but it doesn't work on many computers (well not on my families/friends computers at least, which matters most). Construct 2 is great, but still seems too early to start anything serious since its lacking so many features. Then there's MMF2 which can run on all the computers I want, but games are much more of a hassle to make in MMF2.

I'm still undecided which program I should use for my next project which I'm eager to start, Construct Classic is perfect for the games I want to make but it doesn't work on many computers (well not on my families/friends computers at least, which matters most). Construct 2 is great, but still seems too early to start anything serious since its lacking so many features. Then there's MMF2 which can run on all the computers I want, but games are much more of a hassle to make in MMF2.

If C2 can do what you want with a few extra events to make up for behaviors, go for that. Otherwise MMF2 isn't too bad compared to plain programming.

But then again, ONLY compared to plain programming. Even then I doubt that. Maybe I would prefer learning programming. Why I dislike MMF2 so much? :-/

its there any issues or problems when your project cap reach like, 700 mb/ 1GB or so?

i didn't see any large project and i'm making one big project with persistent world and hand draw images. so i'm asking if construct classic can handle large projects without crash?