aekiro.itch.io/proui

This makes it and a lot of UI things a lot easier.

As much as I bug Scirra to make prefabs. I don't find anything I can't do with Construct 3 within the scope of what they claim the engine does. Make 2D games.

Plugins fill in most of the gaps. Chowdren is a way to get any game worth porting ported to switch.

For the amount of convenience the engine provides - well worth the slight hassles.

You can't, use Aekiro's Game Object plugin instead :)

This is currently doable with Aekiro's gameobject plugin :)

Oh, it's a part of ProUI, I though it was a different plugin. If this is mainly for UI controls, then I guess my questions are irrelevant.

I've bought it, it's actually really good at what you wanted it to do. It's sort of like Prefabs.

The author mainly uses it for UI, but besides some limitations with other behaviors like physics and some platforming issues, there's nothing really stopping you from using it to compose objects!

All this discussion about the limitations of the free version and what it should or should not include, comes across to me as quite irrelevant if not even outright irritating.

A free version of a commercial product is by definition limited. When you list all the benefits of the free edition, I feel that the kind folks at Scirra are being amazingly generous.

If you want more, then for an attractive and reasonable yearly subscription you get a very advanced game engine providing hours of fun and late night entertainment.

The pleasure and satisfaction outweighs a million fold any downsides to paying a meager amount of money.

Nobody is trying to say Scirra is being selfish or not generous. We're saying there should be a better balance of what is allowed to be tested in the free tier so that more people can understand that power. I'm sure as a paid user yourself, you have not been using the free version for awhile so it's hard for you to feel what the engine looks like without the majority of its features and with only 25 events.

Anyway, Tom and scirra have addressed our concerns through discord and we now have a monthly paid plan for people who want to try the engine without sinking in $99 to test the engines full feature set. So it's all good.

There will always be a balance to be struck. There will always be people who will not understand fully what the engine is capable of because they won't sink any money at all into a monthly subscription to test.

construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/construct-right-me-150039

But it's a balance, and Scirra is balancing.

Rory

> I see very little reason why being a small company would stop Scirra from making their free tier more appealing. I'm no business expert but I've been running a F2P MMORPG for 7 years now and if the free to play model has taught me anything is that if you get people invested into your product in time, they're more likely to spend money on it.

>

they need capitol to run day-to-day. they simply can't afford that.

I think you are looking at it like how Unreal and Unity are free. But you may not realize that those companies are huge with lots of other income.

If somehow Jeff Bezos gave Scirra some 10s of million dollars, then sure they could easily make it a free engine. After a few years, and with proper marketing and dev successes Construct would be a serious "contender" in the 3rd party game engine world. And they would eventually see returns from many more people using it which would carry the cost of the casual user. Although this is a big "if", you can't really count on a plan like that. Having used all the major engines I do think Construct is special and there is definitely something there, but its a huge gamble that I doubt they are willing to risk. and doesn't seem currently viable.

Although I think Google would be smart to buy Scirra - and keep them autonomous - and sink in some serious capitol... now that would be great. but who knows, maybe ashley doesn't even want that.

I think you’re missing my point, I’m talking about optimising the free tier to be a better introduction to Construct 3 with the sole intention of better conversion rates from free to paid users. Because as it is, the free tier makes Construct 3 look and feel like a toy and most people won’t pay $99USD to unlock those features that make it powerful, like feeling the power of > 25 events and 2 layers to try an engine. Especially not in modern times now with free alternatives.

But this is a pointless discussion now. As Tom has said, there is probably room for optimisation but they are happy with the growth for now.

I see very little reason why being a small company would stop Scirra from making their free tier more appealing. I'm no business expert but I've been running a F2P MMORPG for 7 years now and if the free to play model has taught me anything is that if you get people invested into your product in time, they're more likely to spend money on it. It's not like people who barely know the engines capabilities will fork out 99 dollars a year to try the engine. They're gonna rely on what they've experienced on the free edition to make that decision. And if they see that the free edition is a toy, they're not going to spend 99 dollars for it.

No.

I want Construct to be an engine not a template.

It would be great if people made examples of plug-and-play shop systems etc. and shared them, but I hardly think that any feature that is as specific as Shop has no place as a in-built feature.

You can build that easily with arrays, variables and simple functions.