That would also be my recommendation; Bootcamp and a newer Windows (7 or 8.1).

To virtualize Windows is a messy thing, and bound to give you frustrations, and 50 shades of grey hair...

The major drawback is that you'll have 2 very separate eco systems; OSX and Windows; and there's no fast way to switch between them (it will require reboot each time). Therefore, choose a Macbook PRO with SSD harddrive, to ensure that the reboots will happen much faster.

Hi all - and first of all, thanks to Scirra for the awesome Construct 2, and also thanks for all you guys for contributing to the forum.

I started programming Pascal and assembler back in the old DOS-days. Remember DOS? 256 colors with the standard IBM driver? But my 'puter had 1 MB graphics card, which meant I could run 16-bit (65.536) colors. And so I made my own special DOS-driver, which enabled me to utilize this vastly larger color space - WHILE still being in DOS-mode (no cheating using Windows 3.11 stuff).

As time went by, I jumped on the wagon of developing J2ME games (java to micro edition); midlet 1, 1.1 and 2. I remember this as being much, much easier than dealing with stupid Pascal.

Then my attention turned more towards making graphics and music, and as more years passed by, I decided to make my games with ActionScript in Flash. As I wanted my games to work on the smartphones which were available back then (those were pre-iPhone days, so in my area, this meant Windows Mobile phones; primarily from HTC), I had to use AS 2. No fancy AS 3 for me...

As HTML 5 and its canvas element, and most importantly WebGL showed up, I became very intrigued. I'm a web programmer, dealing primarily with PHP/MySQL for backend and xHTML 1.1 (strict) and HTML 5 for frontend. Naturally, getting an HTML 5 framework to do future games with, seemed like a good option.

As I own an iPhone and iPad nowadays, I also want the games to be as cross-platform as possible.

And so, I googled, and I found... Phaser. Built upon the extremely fast PIXI.js-engine, Phaser seemed like the best choise. I decided to make a "Flappy Birds" clone, and did so in less than 4 hours. This may not sound that impressive, but I'm primarily a graphics artist, and I also had to read some £$! documentation to use Phaser. The next day, I ran into a world of problems... semi-transparency (8-bit alpha in PNGs) doesn't work properly. Neither does collission detection on pixel level. And worst of all; "resize to fit browser window" cannot be done either. Well, there're workarounds for each of these problems, but if the framework doesn't do these things out of the box, it's a very bad sign in my opinion.

Having read about Construct 2 and lots of other stuff, I decided to give Construct 2 a spin. First of all, because I've read about the connection with the primary competitor (Game Maker) and the pros and cons of each, but also because of the great reviews from non-programmers and programmers alike - especially reviews from mid-2013 and onwards.

My experience with Construct 2 so far, has been so overwhelmingly positive, that even though I probably should've kept using the Free version for a few days more, I decided to buy the Personal License today.

So - two days ago, I downloaded the Free License - and began working on a remake of my Flappy Birds clone that I'd already done in Phaser. I didn't have any time yesterday to work at home, so this little pet project has taken about 10 hours in total. This includes learning and a lot of googling, some trial and error, testing on PC/iPhone/iPad and performance optimization.

I'm extremely impressed at how easy and how WELL it all works - far, far better than anything I'd dared hoped for.

Cool beginning - do mention the controls (WASD) on the intro screen or something, as many will probably be using their arrow keys...

Here's a screendump showing where the icon files are (red ring marks the spot) - just double click on any of them, and replace the graphics inside.

Remember to replace all of them if you export for multiple devices.

For website use, I think that there would be too many issues using Construct 2. But it probably depends on what you want.

Nowadays, reponsive websites are the new black - and this is either impossible or extremely hard to attain, using Construct 2 as your only developing tool.

If you want to combine Construct and HTML5, CSS3 etc. - then yeah, it can be done. But then I'd much rather go with jQuery for fancy effects, and frankly I'd avoid canvas and WebGL. But it depends very much on what you want; fx. if you want your users to navigate with a plane to open up certain parts of your website, Construct can easily do the job. But you want a more traditional approach, I'd advice you to do it more... traditionally.

Also, as I make everything dynamic and my backend is PHP/MySQL, I'd personally be at a loss of how to to that with Construct. Maybe I'll learn some nifty tricks after a while; I'm a newcomer to Construct, but a seasoned web developer. ^_^

Just a Flappy Birds clone; I added a proper END-screen, coins for double points, lives for extended game play and changing the difficulty on the run. There's also some particles added - mostly so that I could see how the game performs on my iOS-devices. After some performance optimization and tweaking, the performance is really good on even the iPhone 5 now.

Trivial things such as a simple highscore keeper at the END-screen is also added. Oh yeah, and the cow is farting - it's a different explosion than the one occuring when you hit a bar, with more than 1 life.