I discovered Construct with the SourceForge award nominees.
I though it was a cool concept, so I downloaded it and installed it. So far so good, good installation script.
Even though I haven't tried to do something with it, I thought I could give an early feedback, close encounter of first kind.
Disclaimer: some opinions there might seem negative, but I give them hoping they might help, not in a troll-like way... After all, I voted for Construct...
I give a programmer point of view, and a parent PoV too: I wondered if my 11 years old daughter could use it. She speak only French and cannot program (yet?).
I first looked at the installation directory. Ah, so there is a Python runtime. Interesting.
And it uses Scintilla, showing good taste! Although I wonder why there is both Scintilla.dll and SciLexer.dll, the latter including the former. And I couldn't find where it is used, since the program stresses out the "no coding" paradigm (which is a good one!).
I see a Language directory, good, maybe I can get a French translation.
I looked around in the forum, found some simple games in .exe form (a bit big, 2MB, but well, a game size come mostly from its assets, graphics and sounds) and couple of source files (.cap format).
First criticism: why have chosen a binary format for these files? It is brittle (some files I tried crashed the runtime of my version of Construct) and it is totally awful to use a version control system (VCS) with them: hard to make incremental saves, no diff, no preview...
I am a proponent to use VCSes beyond pure programming field, such format is annoying.
I am aware it is a bit late in the game to change the format, although some big players like Microsoft did that for Office (switching from pure proprietary binary format to compressed XML). XML might not be the perfect format (could use Json, Yaml, or even self-made format).
I also tried today Anime Studio 5 (which is free for a limited time), and they save the files in a textual format (.anme).
Second criticism: current lack of good translation support.
Seeing a English (UK) folder, I duplicated and translated a few strings. Then I went to the preferences... and saw no way to switch language. I looked where the preferences are saved (C:\Documents and Settings\PhiLho\Application Data\Scirra\Construct.ini) in my case and found a Language property. Good, I change it to Language=French (FR)... and saw no difference.
There was a hint in the forum, so I switched the English (UK) and French (FR) folders and saw at least my translations! But that's ugly...
Now, I also understood it is a work in progress, so I hope it will just get better there. And I am willing to help in the French translation.
On the positive notes, the interface is good looking and reactive, the functionalities seem complete, I will play a bit with it.
Are you using a self-made physics engine? Or does it uses something like Box2D? The Physics demo template runs quite slowly on my lower end, old computer.
In short, keep up the good work, I will try it more and keep an eye on the development.