Thanks all for the feedback - it's interesting to hear all this, especially ideas about how to make a better animation product, and we're reading it all carefully and making lots of notes.
I can't respond to all the feedback right here and right now - there's a huge scope to the questions asked and we haven't made final decisions on much at all yet. Part of the purpose of the public beta is to hear everyone's thoughts and use them to adapt our approach, which is what is happening and why we made this thread. There's a few things I'd still point out though.
First of all Construct Animate is a new product primarily aimed at new customers more interested in animation than game development. Regular C3 users may be wondering why they'd use it, but the point is we're hoping to attract more people who have never used Construct before. Perhaps some of those new Construct Animate users will be interested in moving across to C3 for game creation too, so there could be a side-benefit of boosting C3's audience as well. We're also not aiming at pro users - we know we're not about to steal users from After Effects. We're aiming at the end of the market with simpler use cases. For example we've met several teachers using C3 for lessons who were keen on the idea of using it for animation too. A good analogy for this is the fact lots of pros use Unity for game development does not mean nobody is using C3 for game development - Construct is its own thing with a unique combination of features that appeals to a particular crowd.
Secondly we recognise some C3 users will still be interested in animation too and want to make use of features like 'Export to video'. We have not finalised the pricing model and I don't want to commit to anything specific at this early stage, but we hear your concerns about having to pay for both, and we will definitely be thinking about how to handle that.
Thirdly for those of you concerned about a potential slowdown in development, we started technical research work last summer, and work has continued in the background right up until the beta announcement. I am not aware of anyone who complained during that time that our usual rate of work had slowed down, and I expect us to keep going as we have been. The real work has been the implementation of the Timelines feature, which has been worked on for some years now, and has been included in C3 from the start. It has its uses for game development, but it's also got its uses for animation purposes. That opened up the possibility of designing a dedicated animation tool with a feasible amount of work and with a potentially large upside. As I noted in the blog post, there are many features in common and so in the long run I expect almost all the work we do to benefit both products, which is also why I doubt there will be any meaningful slowdown in development of C3 in future either.
Let us know if you have more feedback on Construct Animate, especially specific improvements we can make - for example there's some good feedback on usability here and we're planning to make improvements on that area soon. Our regular weekly beta updates will also update Construct Animate, so you can keep an eye on changes and let us know how things are developing over time too.