I appreciate the idea, and I'd definitely be willing to pay to sustain a group of artists churning out content 24/7, but there are a number of problems with your current system.

I will begin by breaking down item by item - please don't take this as an offence, I'd love for you guys to succeed and I would love to become a client.

1. Ninja character: Only one attack animation, jump animation too stiff, graphic style would need to be the same in all other assets in order to make a game out of this, ninjas are too "naruto" with the headbands, there is no "classic" ninja that would be compatible. Here is a more usable ninja, though with some animation problems as well.
2. Weapons/tools/items: Don't know how easy it is to change colors, style is inconsistent with the rest of the graphics (switched to pixel art instead of vector), gold looks like copper, there isn't enough differentiation. Here are some swords with more variation, though with the same problem of being hard to change colors.
3. Pixel RPG Houses: Some are simply recolors or have one or two items swapped around. Why not give us individual elements so we can make our own, then? Also:
   • They only have one style, modern suburbs - what about apartments, offices, a bank, park, mall, police station?
   • They are inconsistent with your other RPG sets
   As is, someone could probably make a dating sim, but it's a stretch.
4. Premium pokemon tileset: What makes this "pokemon"? Why is there a zombie? Also, many tiles required to make this a full game are missing, since there is only one terrain type: grasslands
5. Poker & Card Set: Only one you could make a game out of, though you could find many options for card faces, backgrounds, chips and table in other sites.
6. Tower Defense Set: Unusable. Only 4 towers, no animations, once someone used those, all others would be called "clones" or "ripoffs". Stick to generic or reusable art, it's better to hire someone to do specific stuff.
7. Public Pokemon Tileset: Again, what makes this pokemon specific? When you say things like this, it looks like you ripped them off the latest pokemon ROM.
8. Soldiers: Can't move the arms up or down, as one might in a twin stick shooter. There is no "hit", "jump" or "duck" animation. Might also want some terrorists, other camo colors (green), maybe some soviet lookalikes?
9. Platformer Tileset: Extremely incomplete. I could maybe make one level, but that's it. Also, it isn't properly 9-sliced, which would make the ground look blocky, rendering the smoothed corners moot.
10. RPG Tileset Vector: Extremely incomplete, no animation for water, some transitions missing (earth<->cracked earth, earth<->sand, sand<->grass, etc), incompatible with your pokemon tileset.
11. RPG Tile Overlays: Extremely incomplete (forest only), most elements are just recolors/repositionings, incompatible with your pokemon tileset
12. RPG Item Set: Incomplete, random mishmash of items. Maybe make a collection for books, other for gems, other for magic items, other for weapons? Incompatible with your weapons/tools/items/armor pack.

Also, I noticed some items are not your own creations. Do you have authorization to sell them? Even if you do, it isn't displayed clearly. Your licensing information is also not present.

In addition, and I think this is the worst problem for your pricing scheme, it's better for me to hold off, wait for other suckers to pay, wait for you to make a ton of graphics, then pay once, download all graphics, and maybe even make a torrent somewhere - what's stopping me, and what's encouraging people to keep renewing?

I think $29 is way too steep for 12 graphics. There aren't enough assets in any of them to create a full game, either.

If those are the only graphics available right now, I'd say kickstarter or an "early adopter" program would be the way to go. Maybe $29 for lifetime access for the first X people?

Ashley, why not deprecate jQuery officially then? Maybe it could throw a console message or display a warning in the loading screen when in preview mode?

Clearly, I wasn't sufficiently discouraged =P and so I'm being "punished" for making an observation which isn't explicitly pro-Scirra (just how the community behaves, and in accordance with the gamified system).

No, no, please do go on.

Just be careful when attributing malice - perhaps the system just doesn't work as intended, and instead of fostering free speech like it was intended, it encourages mindless following due to a design mistake?

In this case, it needs fixing.

Jayjay

I believe Ashley has stated that there will be an extension manager integrated with c2 to download third party behaviors/plugins at some point in the future.

That should solve things.

I think even the most extremely basic of multiplayer built-in features would attract beginner devs to multiplayer concepts, make Construct 2 even more viable in educational uses, and also would allow people to still make decent things without much effort outside of the program. Literally, sending messages between each other is all they need to do built-in for it to be useful.

I agree with everything you said except "built-in". Why can't third party devs make it? What exactly makes it so that Scirra must be the one to do it?

I'd agree with you if it were something deeply integrated with Construct - something devs don't have access to - but like I said, the only way for Scirra to commit to that is if Ashley believes the end result will be good, and the only way for the end result to be truly great is a node.js exporter which IMHO isn't worth the trouble comparing to other stuff that can only be done by Scirra.

This presentation has been thrown around - trust me, it's not as helpful as it looks. A trained programmer can make those abstractions in his head.

As for movement and platform design, it is indeed quite cool, but I don't think the time it takes to code such a system represents a saving over the developer just manually redoing jumps and tweaking the level.

Still, it's a great presentation, thanks for the link!

I can definitely see the need for something like this.

If only I had the time...

You might want to suggest this over on the extension development forum.

As an update to this thread, check out Edmund McMillen's Binding of Isaac's postmortem, specifically page 3

I recommend you read the entire postmortem, but he discusses how flash really wasn't appropriate for the kind of game he wanted to do, and how flash couldn't even compile the end result consistently when the files passed 300Mb. He goes on to say he regrets making it in flash.

It makes me wonder - would construct games over 300Mb have issues as well?

Velojet, as explained it's just as bad as most cheating in games anyway where players can self-host servers or even MMO's with "anti-cheat". A slightly easier way to fix it is to simply not tell the player they are the host, and to try and pick host by best ping.

Anti-cheat doesn't work - see gunbound/maple story.

rexrainbow, ah awesome, and yes I know it's not MMO quality, but I'm thinking of smaller games that people play with their friends rather than massive multiplayer.

As Ashley said, if he cannot make it work seamlessly with the same quality as the rest of the product, he'll leave it to third party developers (that's us).

Ashley, ah okay I know exactly what you mean, but I think it'd be really important for built-in support for even the most basic of things like online chat, for those who aren't worried about extreme cheating or aren't basing their game around the multiplayer aspect.

It'd still involve a server, and custom server-side scripting, since p2p html5 tech isn't there yet, and even if it was, we'd have no way of identifying multiple instances of our game without a server.

It could be like exporting Windows 8 apps instead though, where you go into the exported files and change a value or two to make the server work specific to your game.

a value or two or thirty or a hundred thousand...

The only way I see this working is an exporter for node.js that skips drawing - as awesome as I think that would be, the work/benefit ratio isn't as good compared to, for instance, new objects/plugins (deep json parsing, rich text boxes, skinnable form controls, etc), more powerful eventing (custom ACEs, callbacks, widgets, modules, etc), IDE options (collaborative editing, search'n'replace, tiled level editor, AI editor, etc), developer possibilities (Hooking into the interface, plugins able spawn dialogs) or even working on the site (improving the store and the arcade, for instance). Thoughts Ashley?

Wow, looks like almost exactly the same thing as Spriter! Even the UI is almost identical! If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a blatant ripoff.

I could be wrong but from what I've seen it looks very, very similar.

I wouldn't say it's a ripoff - maybe the project was on its way before spriter, or maybe the author saw spriter and didn't like where it was heading (it appears to be the case, since they don't seem to want a proprietary export format), or maybe he was playing around with the idea, and spriter spurred him into action.

In any case, competition is always good - you can't have too many animation tools.

Are there other similar tools out similar to Construct 2 to help non programmers build Flash games?

Multimedia Fusion 2 can export to flash, and it is also a "no programming" tool. They are also working on Multimedia Fusion 3, though nothing has been shown so far.

If you absolutely must support flash, I'd give MMF2 a go. They also offer some pretty compelling exporters, such as native iOS applications, linux, java, java for mobile, xna(dead, unfortunately) and they're working on a native android exporter.

As another commenter said, they have a free "the games factory" demo that I would encourage you to try.

You'll quickly realize, however, that construct's workflow is vastly superior, and Ashley/Tom do a much better job updating the product, fixing bugs, cultivating the community, creating strategic partnerships (spriter being the most recent)... well let me just cut it short and say that C2 is a better product, and if you end up using MMF2 because you have to support flash, you'll be wishing you were using construct 2 instead.

I had to go through that because a client needed a real time game, and I could only make it work with UDP (unsupported in HTML5 as of this post), so I had to use MMF2. It's worth repeating, once you start working in construct, you don't go back.