Hi all,
I'm a newbie to Construct 2. I've been a web developer for a while (HTML to CSS to PHP) and long ago took C++ in school. Even longer ago, I created text adventures in Basic. Now that I'm somewhat competent at graphics and pretty decent at coding (or logic, if you will) and even have dabbled in game design (I created a board game called Supernova.. find it on Amazon if you're interested).
Where I'm at right now is this: I'm trying to decide between using Construct 2 or Stencyl.
I'm going to use Fireworks (which I'm very, very familiar with already) for Graphics, Spriter for animation (I've already bought it) and very likely, Tiled for tileset creation.
Up until discovering Spriter, I was set on using Stencyl. I had tried it and C2 and felt that Stencyl had the upper hand for several reasons (and hence this post - to discover if they're valid reasons) - but after seeing how integrated Spriter is with C2, I'm wavering. Perhaps you guys and gals can give me a better understanding on this.
My thoughts on Stencyl were this:
The "snap-together' code blocks are really fantastic, allowing for some very complex behaviors to be built somewhat simply.
The tileset functionality is comprehensive and straightforward.
The ability to create native apps for iOS and Android is perhaps the biggest selling point for me.
Multi-platform capabilities - I mostly will develop on Windows, but I also run Linux, which will enable cross-platform testing as well.
The main bad thing about Stencyl is basically the price, but also the fact that it seems far less streamlined than Construct 2. In other words, it seems like I could create a similar game in C2 way faster than Stencyl - but I don't know if that is at the risk of far less flexibility in some areas.
The video that the Spriter guys put together about how you can change character maps at runtime in Construct 2 is swaying me heavily towards C2.
Thoughts? Am I totally missing something about non-native apps (ie: HTML5 apps wrapped for different platforms) that makes it an irrelevant advantage? Is there things that C2 can do that just isn't possible (or not done nearly as well in Stencyl?)
Thanks in advance for your feedback and advice. I just don't want to get far down the road with any tool and discover I've made the wrong choice for game engine and have to start over. Right now, I've only paid for Spriter and I'll be going with that for animation regardless of the engine I ultimately choose.
Oliver