In 2011 brothers Ashley and Tom Gullen worked in their evenings from their bedrooms creating Construct. At the time, GameMaker was the 2D game engine incumbent - the ambitious goal of Construct was to one day challenge GameMakers position.
Long hours were poured into Construct into the early mornings and through weekends to get Construct off the ground. We believed we could do it better. Today with a larger team and an actual office — we think we have.
After the release of Construct 3 in 2017, Construct has grown to be one of the most popular and well loved game engines on the market with countless users adopting it for amazing projects all around the world. It is a real and powerful alternative to GameMaker with a wide array of advantages many game developers and educators may not be aware of.
Construct's come a long way thanks to the loyalty and feedback from our customers.
We always strive to add more and better features - as a growing company we feel we are nimble and better equipped to deliver on our promises fast.
If you're going to go through the effort of learning a programming language, you might be best off picking one that's popular and widely used in industry.
Recruitment platform Devskiller in 2020 analyzed over 200,000 coding tests in 143 countries and found that 72% of companies are looking to hire JavaScript developers.
Stack Overflow's 2021 developer survey lists Javascript as the top language respondents worked with extensively in the past year.
Program in JavaScript - an industry standard programming language
Uses its own proprietary GameMaker Language to program with
Given a simple number crunching benchmark in Javascript and GameMaker Language using their C++ compiler, Javascript was the clear winner, and not by a hair. Javascript was nearly 6x faster.
No large downloads and lengthy installations required - Construct 3 launches directly in your browser and will be updated with the latest features automatically as they are released. It's a breeze to switch between devices - it even runs on mobile devices.
If you're managing a lot of computers in a school or workplace, having to download and update installations can be laborious and time consuming. With Construct 3 you don't need to go through this process at all.
~6mb download - around half the size of the YoYo Games homepage!
~113mb download, and installation required on computer. Over 18x larger than Construct 3's download.
No game editor runs officially on as many devices as Construct 3. This is incredibly important if you're running educational programs remotely, or where there is a variety of devices or a prevalence of Chromebooks.
Over 50% of HTML5 games submitted to Kongregate were built in Construct, and Construct 3 is the 2nd most popular game engine on Itch.io, one of the leading platforms for indie game developers.
Over 16,000 projects on Itch.io using Construct
31% fewer projects than Construct on Itch.io
Don't get lost scrolling around spaghetti-like flowchart systems. Construct's event sheets stay ordered and tidy in a straightforward list, no matter how complex your logic gets. You can build ambitious and sophisticated games solely using event blocks - no matter the size of your game, you can make it without having to write a single line of code.
If you decide to take the plunge, it's easy to add snippets of JavaScript inline to event sheets, or add JavaScript files.
Instantly add sophisticated gameplay mechanics with a few clicks. There's no need to figure out the code for complicated movements like platformers - use robust, optimised and fully-featured behaviors unique to Construct right out of the box.
With Construct 3 you focus on making a great game rather than coding yet another mechanic.
Instantly add eye-popping visual effects powered by advanced graphics technologies. There's no need to write any code to manage shaders or figure out interesting effects - choose from over 80 built-in effects and add them in any combination you like, on individual objects, entire layers, or the whole screen, and preview how it all looks right in the editor.
You can still extend your library with effects from third-party developers. Construct also provides lots more exciting visual features like mesh distortion, shadow casting, a drop-in 3D shape object, and more.
As a HTML5-based engine, Construct makes it easy to integrate web content, ranging from iframes, YouTube videos, loading images and data from the web, and more, all in a cross-platform way. There's a wide range of customisable HTML-based form controls for quickly getting user input, and advanced cross-platform interactivity features like recording videos and using microphone input.
You can even design parts of your game with HTML and CSS - the ultimate solution to easily get great results for things like menus, tables, user interfaces and more.
When you're developing your game for mobile devices, being able to quickly test your work on an actual mobile device can be invaluable.
With Construct 3, this is as easy as clicking "Remote Preview", then scanning the QR code on the mobile device you wish to test on. It just works!
Share the QR code with anyone in the world, as long as they have an internet connection they'll be able to try it out.
GameMaker doesn't have a remote preview feature like Construct. For some platforms such as Android you may need to set up some additional development tools such as the Android SDK.
We releases new updates to Construct 3 more far more regularly than GameMaker. We adopt the "Release Early, Release Often" philosophy that gets changes and bug fixes into users hands as fast as possible.
166 public releases
16 public releases
Want to learn about even more great Construct features like instant savegames, text formatting and many others? Head on over to our features page.