Ashley So I see what you're saying and agree, but I think your skepticism may change if you change your point of view. The community will vote on big grand features but you're god and don't have to do it. If you explore what things unity have planned to do from the list they are often things with 50 or so votes which have a small work load and polish off the sharp edges of the existing product. For instance I would quite like small little things like;
- Add the ability to change the webpage background. Using the letterbox feature the page background used to be black but recently it has changed to white. So now I have to manually change the html to black.
- Add an advert bar template page that I can add html to so when I do an export to html with an advert bar it is automatically included rather than me manually adding it every time.
These are small things but the less stuff I have to do outside of C2 the better. They wouldn't make the most voted but they might get a small following.
On the other hand if you do get something crazy with a bazillion votes on then perhaps kickstarter it or add a donate button and employ extra staff to do it when enough money has come in. >:)
Anyway, its all time and money. I personally will be using Construct2 for the next three years after coming out of eight years of commercial development. Check out my linkedin if you're interested (http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mathewnicholas). The choice of using C2 over coding natively or using a html engine with wrapper came down to a few things.
- Project time - The shorter the project time the more games I can produce which increases the chances of hitting it big. I see C2 as something that takes away the burden of programming so I concentrate on getting my ideas working.
- Cross platform - The more platforms I can export it to the more places in can sell and potentially take off. All from one code base. As you may have noticed I have concentrated on making my way through all of the mobile export options, at present I am making my way through blackberry and intend to do Tizen next. They are probably are not worth the effort BUT you never know.
The future for C2 in my opinion should focus on social network integration for all mobile exports. This is the most important marketing feature for small independent game companies. If developers can incentivise the feature so the gamers that are playing game are advertising for free to their friends then this is great. I understand that this requires collaboration from third parties but it is one of the top features required features imo. Does the facebook object work for windows phone, blackberry and Tizen?
For my monetisation options I have used something similar to the candy crush saga. You use lives by failing levels, these lives regenerate over time. For this I had use a plugin made by rex that allowed me to get a unix timestamp so I could calculate how much time had passed between game sessions. I would quite like to see an official version on this built into C2. I don't mind using plugins but it means I can't publish to the scirra arcade <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_sad.gif" alt=":(" title="Sad">.
I would also like the ability to be able to disable plugins within C2. Why? If I delete a plugin it takes away all the events associated with it. For instance FGL made a plugin that shows a tester splashscreen at the start of the game. It allows you to turn things on and off i.e. branding. So as soon as I add this I have to fork out my project and make changes to both OR re-add the FGL plugin with all the associated events. I assume this would be the same case for unsupported plugins for the scirra arcade? At the end of the day I just one build that I can configure to work everywhere.