Hi there. New subscriber here. I have had a little time with Construct 3's timeline, which led me to have a look at the 'Animate' standalone tool. As my game project progresses, I'm looking to see where I can use 'Animate' to help that process. So here are a few initial thoughts. I'm a professional animator with a background in many different tools. I will post thoughts about functionality once I have had more time with 'Animate'.
Here goes:
I chose to sign up to C3 for many reasons, and one of them was the timeline utility. It works well and I'm enjoying using C3 very much. I wasn't initially aware of 'Animate'. I'm planning to use C3's timeline to make animated cut scenes with game assets, and it would be *very* useful if those scenes could be exported as a webm or mp4 file. I would prefer that video export feature to be available in C3 as part of my existing subscription.
I now realise I can use 'Animate' to render those cut scenes / layouts to video. I would like to be able to import a C3 file into the 'Animate' environment without having to strip out unsupported behaviours/features from C3 before opening them in 'Animate'. I would prefer 'Animate' to simply ignore unsupported behaviours/features and let me edit the file anyway, rather than not opening the file (as is the current case).
I started my career using Flash in the mid 1990s, and that software's eventual ability to author both interactive and video content made it a brilliant tool for independent makers. I would like to see C3 evolve into something similar without being broken into 2 distinct products, but I understand you need to find a business plan that works for you.
So, if 'Animate' continues to be a viable separate product for you I would like to be able to switch seamlessly between C3 and 'Animate' without any difficulty. If this was the case I would consider a separate subscription. I would also request that video export from timeline to be a feature in future releases of C3, for those times when the extra functionality of 'Animate' wasn't needed/wanted.
Apologies if any of this has been covered elsewhere/earlier. I'm new here and I'm spending most of my available time looking up C3's game dev documentation, but I wanted to record initial thoughts here.
Cheers!