Patrick.Muenster's Forum Posts

    I understand why there is no lifetime plan for Contruct. You pay for hosting the engine on a server and continuous updates, improvements and bug fixes.

    So it will be difficult fo the Construct team to offer a lifetime plan at an affordable price.

    But I am still for an extension of the free version ;-)

    See: construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/constrcut-great-reconsider-165652

    I'm afraid that you won't find a really comparable engine to Construct.

    Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) or Phaser (https://phaser.io/) would be two free alternatives, but with the latter you can't avoid programming.

    Maybe you can get an education license as a student, which is even cheaper than the individual plan.

  • You just said you can do a lot in the free version, so what limits would you expect to allow for comfortable teaching? If I was doing a game design workshop in Construct I wouldn't allow them to start using a free 3D engine, that sounds like they're not following my course.

    More than 50 events, more than 2 layers, no JavaScript limitations. This tree things are the most painful things.

    We do not allow them to use another engine. The course is designed for Construct only. So, at least for the younger ones it doesn't make sense to use a different engine in the process.

    But many are not happy with Construct and the reason is not the engine itself, but that after the course they no longer have a license to continue to build in the same form.

    The same goes for teachers, which is why I'm asked if I can't do it in another engine. But I like Construct 🙄

  • In other classes..

    Like math, english, geography, history or whatever there is, do you get the educational resources you need for free in those areas?

    I'm not sure how schools work, maybe different in different countries, but to get or use the material needed for free is nothing I've heard of.>

    Yes that's true, but you don't buy a subscription for 100 or 200 pupils every year and/or swithing seats (licences) all two month.

    The educational license doesn't seem expensive to me.

    It gets expensive very quickly if you need licenses for multiple classes. Example: 4 classes a 30 students over one year with 29,99 per license makes 3.598,80€ per year!

    That's not the world, but not exactly little either!

    What would happen if your school would teach Photoshop or Premiere classes?

    Well talking about Adobe is a good point.

    Not long ago, all Adobe products were free for teaching. This has only changed with Creative Cloud. However, Substance Painter and XD, for example, are still free for education. Even the very expensive licenses from Autodesk (Inventor, Fusion 360, Maya etc. are free for education.

    All have something in common: they are largely market leaders (some were before, some are now).

    The same is true about many other UX and design tools like AXURE or Figma. The list is very long indeed. And I think that's a good decision, because students grow up with these products and buy them later or expect them from their company.

    By the way, Media University Stuttgart, for example, now uses Affinity Designer and Photo in all subjects where Photoshop and co are not mandatory, because otherwise they would have had to buy several hundred licenses. That's just the consequence.

    Photoshop is still the better product. But we (usually) don't teach it anymore.

  • Thanks for the reply!

    I know iFrames are not a clean solution, that's why I'm asking for alternatives.

    But you can do almost magical things with it^^ and it was just my first approach cause I did not find any other standard object type that could do the job.

    The hint with the plugin let me to this one https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/addons/190/html-element.

    It does the job by adding a new object "HTML" to Construct. But you have to assign the HTML Tag in the editor. I would prefere simply writing some code as text which is much faster.

    There seems to be a workaround.

    Every HTML object has a 'Text like HTML' checkbox. This allows you to put HTML in the text editor. It might do the job, but I have to test it.

    I've expected a way like in Phaser.io or PlayCanvas. There you can simply load and render html files with CSS and JavaScript.

  • Hi,

    I wanted to ask if there is a more or less clean way to create an ui in HTML that is overlaying the canvas to control the game?

    I've tested it with an iframe and put my HTML ui inside. Then I've used the API with Javasctipt to communicate with the game.

    Is there a better, more sophisticated way to do this?

    Tagged:

  • Someone else just posted about how much you can do with just 50 events. I think there is indeed quite a lot of scope to do things within that limit. You can certainly make interesting mini-games and such.

    Something I've noticed from around a decade working in commercial software is no matter what the free limits are, someone will come along and argue there should be more available for free. We have to run as a business though. If we give too much away free and nobody buys the software, we'd go out of business, and then the software wouldn't exist at all. You can throw around some big changes to the whole business plan, but I can assure you many of them would also totally ruin us. We have our own unique market and niche and we've put a great deal of thought in to it already, and I'm pretty happy with where we've ended up.>

    Thanks for the official answer.

    I am well aware of the post on how much you can do with just 50 events. But it's not just about the events. Also the limitation of the layers and scripts bring the game design quickly to the limits or make sure that I have to think of complicated workarounds.

    To bring it to the point, the most disturbing things for me are:

    - Limitation to 50 events

    - Limitation to 2 layers

    - Limitation to two JavaScript files with 50 lines each

    However, I would put it this way. You can do quite a bit with it, I just would never do it that way if all the features were available to me. So I bend structures to meet the limitations and I don't know if I want to teach that.

    In this respect, I consider the current limitations to be very incisive for the learning process.

    We don't have to discuss that Construct is a paid software and I don't want to point out or suggest to make the full functionality available for free.

    But wouldn't there have been less drastic options for non-commercial use?

    Just thoughts from me:

    - Watermark in Build

    - Limitation of screen resolution (game resolution)

    - Limit storage space size for assets

    I'm not talking about professional use either, I'm just talking about teaching. And there Construct makes itself useless for most teachers with the restrictions. At this point, the objection comes: "Yes, we want to sell our education license. "

    I can only say that in several years I have not had one school that has purchased several licenses for teaching.

    The result is always that despite the higher entry hurdle switched to another engine. And apart from the fact that it is bad for me 😉 I just ask the question whether this is beneficial for Construct. Of course, I can only speak for myself in my small environment in Germany and do not know how others are doing.

  • Funnily enough, I recently have been considering the idea of doing some game design courses to raise money for a local charity, but I wonder if it would common for people to not be able to afford a subscription once they go home and want to continue playing around with C3.

    In fact, this works quite well with the courses at schools, in my case, I offer the students the licenses for the duration of the course. However, Construct's business model interferes with my concept, as students and teachers are not willing to pay for the sporadic use of Construct. Thus it is clear for the students from the beginning that they cannot/will not deepen the knowledge they have learned.

    In this respect, I am currently questioning my concept and thinking about using a different engine.Unfortunately Contruct is pretty cool for beginners.

  • Just wanted to point out that the algorithmic and logical lessons learned from working with Construct, as well as basic computer science principles such as variables, expressions, functions, and mathematics concepts, will carry over to any programming language regardless of engine.

    So if I were an educator, I would consider that the value proposition here has nothing to do with if my students continue using construct or not in the future (I wouldn't really care), but rather how easy it is for me to teach in Construct versus another engine?

    Personally I would hate to waste time in a programming class worrying about syntax and compiling issues ect if I could be focusing on building a strong foundation for algorithmic logic instead. But of course that depends on what the goal of your class is...

    That's a very good point and I totally agree. But as you said it depends on what the goal of the class is. In my case it's game design and art, not development. And especially in school, and younger classes, the entry into other engines is much more difficult, because programming knowledge and the understanding of the Logic are required. In my opinion, Construct thus plays to one of its strengths with a target group that will very rarely pay anything for it.

  • Hi,

    I've used Phaser which has a useable editor now. It's close to Construct, but I think you won't find somethink that is really like Construct at the moment. At least I don't know something similar.

    https://phasereditor2d.com/

    More complex but still easy to use is Cocos:

    https://www.cocos.com/en/products

    Another free and simple to use engine is Panda. But is has no editor and you have to do everything by code:

    https://www.panda2.io/

    For codeless projects you can have a look at Scratch:

    https://scratch.mit.edu/

    Or on Android and iOS have a look at PocketCode:

    https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocket-code/id1117935892

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Catrobat

    One more thing:

    GDevelop https://gdevelop-app.com/

    I haven't tried, but it seems to be similar to the concept of Construct

  • Since 2015, I have now been using Construct (Construct 2 and Construct 3) professionally for game development and in education.

    I am a lecturer at a university and give game design workshops for children from about 14 years. I use Construct especially because of the low entry barrier. And it works great!

    There's just one thing:

    Actually, at the latest after it is clear that it is a paid engine, nobody wants to work with it anymore.

    That means the students do a project under my guidance and within the course with Construct and then switch directly to another engine like Unity, Unreal, Godot, Phaser or PlayCanvas. Unity and Unreal are of course the top dogs and who wouldn't want to make fantastic looking AAA games with one of the most powerful engines, which favors the popularity of these engines. But all these engines have something in common. They are largely free for non-commercial (non-professional use).

    And there is the problem with Construct. It's not free, not really.

    The restrictions of the free version are so limiting that even for beginner courses I reach the limits.

    That's why no teacher I've taken a course with was willing to make Construct a permanent course at the school. The effort to buy education accounts for 2 months and to cancel them afterwards (and maybe to buy them again for a project in between) is too big and to buy them for the whole year for several classes is far too expensive.

    I use my licenses for different students, so I have a good utilization of my licenses. That's why I'm in a much better position and don't have to worry much about it.

    Nevertheless, I think that the current price model of Construct is not conducive to the distribution and use especially in teaching. Although Construct has strengths right there that other engines don't have (#Bahaviors).

    I realize that you need to make money with your engine. But even if Construct is technically great, in my experience, hardly anyone wants to continue working or experimenting with it later. The limitations of the free license are too great and everyone inevitably asks themselves why they should pay for Construct when there are such great free engines. You have to measure yourself against them and compete with them.

    The real clincher for me would be the aforementioned low barrier to entry. But this hardly plays a role in an advanced project. So why Construct and no other engine.

    This is not only a question I have to put up with, but also a question I have to ask myself. Maybe it would be more interesting for me to use another engine in my courses.

    I would like to share this experience report here publicly as food for thought for discussion with you.

    Tagged:

  • Thanks for all the information. I'll try to play through your game and hope that you have the time to finish it. I know it's very difficult to do a project like that in your free time.

    Just out of interest, how many character icons and animations would you need?

  • I'm very impressed. Acutally a great game that I would buy.

    It's beautiully designed and a very good versatile gameplay. Also the UI Design is very well done.

    What I didn't like at first was the intro video. It doesn't have enough action for me and is very lengthy. In addition, I would have liked a different representation of the graphic style. However, I have to say that the real video also makes the real problem of the game's plot much more real. And I think that's exactly what you wanted too. Maybe the beginning, with the somewhat monotonous announcements of the moderators can be spiced up a bit or accompanied by music?

    The only thing I don't like so much are the pictures of the characters. But that is a matter of taste. I just don't like the style and would have imagined it differently.

    Still, just a great game! What about the release?

  • Thank you!

    Yes, it was and still is a paid project.

    The intension for me is to teaser the real opera and encourage curiosity and interest.

    In Covid times, this may have an even higher value.

  • Maestro Maragrini is an educational game for children commissioned by the Munich National Theater.

    maestro-margarini.staatsoper.de

    Every year a new game is added. The latest is the inspector game (German: Inspizientenspiel)

    Try it!

    Have you ever thought about where the great costumes come from that you see on stage at the opera house or theater? And do you know how many spotlights put a scene in the right light? At maestro-margarini.de, conductor Maestro Margarini will show you around the entire Munich National Theater. You'll get to know the tailor shop, the orchestra, the lighting technicians and all the other departments that make sure the audience can enjoy an opera or ballet from start to finish.

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  • Maestro Maragrini is an educational game for children commissioned by the Munich National Theater.

    maestro-margarini.staatsoper.de

    Every year a new game is added. The latest is the inspector game (German: Inspizientenspiel)

    Try it!

    Have you ever thought about where the great costumes come from that you see on stage at the opera house or theater? And do you know how many spotlights put a scene in the right light? At maestro-margarini.de, conductor Maestro Margarini will show you around the entire Munich National Theater. You'll get to know the tailor shop, the orchestra, the lighting technicians and all the other departments that make sure the audience can enjoy an opera or ballet from start to finish.