Some general questions between two development platfroms

Good afternoon all,

I have been playing around with Construct 3 Free Edition and also G-Develop 5 and am trying to come to an conclusion of which platform I should settle on to use for my future 2D game projects and just wanted to ask and hopefully get some real straight forward unbiased answers to some of my questions here before I make a final decision on this. I have noticed that both Construct 3 and G-Develop 5 seem to be very similar not only in their overall layout.. But in functionality as well even down to the eventsheets. With that being said.. The only difference I notice is that Construct 3 of course is a paid subscription service versus G-Develop 5 being mostly an open-source and free development platform with the exception of it's online build services for mobile compilations which if you want to compile more than twice a day then you have to buy a subscription plan to be able to do more compilations to mobile. I know that the development team of Construct 3 do constantly update their software all the time fixing bugs and adding new functionality to the platform which is an awesome thing for not only the engine and tools but for the customers as well. But even thought G-Develop 5 is open-source and many people contribute to it.. It also seems to be constantly updated as well and has fairly well support for it too! So with all these comparisons between the two.. What could be said about these two platforms that would make one stand out better from the other? What other differences would make one outshine the other or why would one be a better choice over the other? I respectfully post this with the sincere hopes of simply learning the differences so I can make the best choice possibly is all. I give an advanced thank you to all for your kind time and efforts on any and all replies to my questions. God Bless all! :)

I think you will get responses biased toward Construct because this is a construct users forum.

I don’t think most have really used gdevelop 5 here. I looked at it before but not too much.

Mobile exports are typically done with a service since it’s pretty involved to do manually. So I can see why both charge for it.

Apart from that it’s mainly a personal choice which to use. You could try to make a game in both and see if the workflow differs and which you prefer.

I got a job for a few months ago where I had to fix and improve a G-Develop 5 game. The job was for a bit more than 3 weeks.

It was indeed a very frustrating experience, yes, I get used to Construct 2 (and 3), but many things are totally not user friendly at all.

For example, figure out how to create a function was difficult, lack of proper documentation and lack of community talking about a topic like that.

Many things makes no sense to me, like why there is no ELSE? I had to create a variable to handle all the ELSEs of the project, I could have done the same thing 10 time faster in Construct.

Array aren't supported unless you install a plugin, and if I recall well, they are only a 1-dimension array. I had to create manually lots of conditions to simulate an Array. Thing that in construct takes just a few seconds instead of hours.

On the other hand there where a few cases where I could do things that aren't directly doable on Construct, even if I haven't totally investigate through it, perhaps I could try with JS.

For example, I could play a file that was on a website instead inside the project. I was also able to use synthetic voice with JS (but this I am quite sure I can try to do it with Construct as well).

As R0J0hound said, my opinion come after having used Construct for 8 years, so my skills aren't comparable to the ones on G-Develop5. However, if I think about my first attempt with Construct 8 years ago, and the recent ones with G-Develop5, Construct was much easier to pick up.

I want also to add that G-Develop5 is somehow similar to Construct, so coming from Construct has helped me a lot compared to when I moved to Construct with my Basic/Pascal/Cobol/Clipper and a month of Game Maker Studio experience.

Also when I used G-Develop, I had 8 more years of programming experience on my shoulders, compared to when I started with Construct. So G-Develop had indeed a big advantage, but still failed the comparison from the point of view of difficulty in starting with the program, and if you consider how much is easy to get frustrated in the first week and give up game development, I would definitely consider Construct as your option.

My usual advice to avoid to "waste" money is to start with the free version of Construct 2, then when the limitations stops your experiments and progress, move to the free version of C3 (register to have more events) and finally once you are ready, especially if you want to make a living with that, start with the C3 subscription.