Thanks everybody - the level of activity and help available in this forum is amazing. I know I made the right choice.

Thanks everyone for your responses.

I chose Construct 2 - I bought a personal license this morning. It came down to several things - Scirra updates C2 ridiculously often. Stencyl's last update was in May. C2 has a huge amount of effects available while Stencyl is limited to around 6, all oriented around colour tinting - in addition, C2 has a ton of user-created plugins that extend this. Finally, there's the community - on the C2 forums I got around 13 replies... on Stencyl forums I got 3.

Then there's lots of other little things that swayed me to C2, like the Spriter integration, the one-time vs recurring fee, the active community, the extensive tutorials, the ability to export to Kongregate and NewGrounds, the free art packs, etc etc.

Now I'm off to start making a game. Wish me luck!

Hi all,

Thanks for your responses. I'm sure I'll use the HTML5 option for Kongregate/Newgrounds if/when my game gets to that point, but my main target is Android & iOS. I want to make sure that whatever I make works and runs well on those platforms, everything else is a distant second. As for platforms like desktop and linux, I'm not really concerned about exporting to those. They're a 'nice to have' and I'll look at them once I've actually made a game. I might occasionally develop on linux if there was a client (ie: Stencyl).

My main objective for the post was just to make sure that if I do indeed go with C2, that I won't be sacrificing major functionality or performance by virtue of it exporting HTML via wrappers. Everything I've read about C2's functionalities, ease of use, speed of development and capability has been stellar.

I'm going to play with them both a bunch this weekend and then decide. Thanks again!

Hi all,

I'm a newbie to Construct 2. I've been a web developer for a while (HTML to CSS to PHP) and long ago took C++ in school. Even longer ago, I created text adventures in Basic. Now that I'm somewhat competent at graphics and pretty decent at coding (or logic, if you will) and even have dabbled in game design (I created a board game called Supernova.. find it on Amazon if you're interested).

Where I'm at right now is this: I'm trying to decide between using Construct 2 or Stencyl.

I'm going to use Fireworks (which I'm very, very familiar with already) for Graphics, Spriter for animation (I've already bought it) and very likely, Tiled for tileset creation.

Up until discovering Spriter, I was set on using Stencyl. I had tried it and C2 and felt that Stencyl had the upper hand for several reasons (and hence this post - to discover if they're valid reasons) - but after seeing how integrated Spriter is with C2, I'm wavering. Perhaps you guys and gals can give me a better understanding on this.

My thoughts on Stencyl were this:

The "snap-together' code blocks are really fantastic, allowing for some very complex behaviors to be built somewhat simply. The tileset functionality is comprehensive and straightforward. The ability to create native apps for iOS and Android is perhaps the biggest selling point for me. Multi-platform capabilities - I mostly will develop on Windows, but I also run Linux, which will enable cross-platform testing as well.

The main bad thing about Stencyl is basically the price, but also the fact that it seems far less streamlined than Construct 2. In other words, it seems like I could create a similar game in C2 way faster than Stencyl - but I don't know if that is at the risk of far less flexibility in some areas.

The video that the Spriter guys put together about how you can change character maps at runtime in Construct 2 is swaying me heavily towards C2.

Thoughts? Am I totally missing something about non-native apps (ie: HTML5 apps wrapped for different platforms) that makes it an irrelevant advantage? Is there things that C2 can do that just isn't possible (or not done nearly as well in Stencyl?)

Thanks in advance for your feedback and advice. I just don't want to get far down the road with any tool and discover I've made the wrong choice for game engine and have to start over. Right now, I've only paid for Spriter and I'll be going with that for animation regardless of the engine I ultimately choose.

Oliver