Woof. What a weekend.
A little background on me. I've done some game dev before, published a small game on iOS.
Recently, I bought a chromebook because I liked the form factor and the insane battery life. I mainly used unity3D for development before, but projects seemed to become unwieldy and I'd lose interest. Unity3D doesn't run on chromebooks natively (there's a linux workaround, but it takes a monstrous amount of memory and I bought a cheapo model that has about 32 gigs).
Eventually, I found out about construct, and decided to give it a shot. Loaded up a tutorial on youtube, and started in earnest. It took me about an hour to overcome the initial learning curve, and soon after that I was off to the races. I've been using it for about four or five days now, and what an experience. There's been a few moments of frustration, but for the most part everything is incredibly intuitive.
Construct 3 is like an answer to my prayers. It hits the triple point of ease of use, technical ability, and accessibility.
I quickly decided to undertake a project to see what I could do with the free versions 50 event limit. You can check out my project here:
gamejolt.com/games/domina/669582
At first I thought I had made it with 49 events. You'll probably notice there's no way to get any points, and the item box never has anything in it. I may remove them in a newer release. There's also a handful of bugs and things that don't work as expected. These could easily be remedied by adding a few extra events, but I'm fresh out. Still, I've managed to create a castlevania like with different levels, three different monsters, music, sound effects, and more. There's even parallax...even though it may not look like it at first.
My hat is off to the team at construct. I'm probably going to collapse for a few hours, but I plan on buying the business license when I come to.
If anyone was wondering what you can get done with the free version...the answer is quite a bit. You have to be economical with your scope and how you use your events, but if you're on the fence and you're into Pixel Art or Retro Style games you do not need to look any further.