If am surprised that no one has suggested Aseprite. If you want a slick pixelart sprite editor that excels at sprite animation and is constantly being updated, there is nothing better out there. At $10 it is an absolute steal. PyxelEdit is still better for pixelart tilemaps, but alas it has seemingly been abandoned by the developer.

http://www.aseprite.org/

I'm a bit off topic, but I couldn't help myself but reacting to the assertion that GDevelop is a shameless rip of C2

I first created GDevelop when I wasn't aware of the existence of Construct (Classic), and both software evolved separately. Of course some objects and features are inspired from C2 (maybe also vice-versa, I don't know) But the event system was clearly invented without looking at Construct.

That's all (I hope my message won't be considered as spamming, as I'm the developer of GDevelop. Just wanted to make things clear!)

Ok, sorry about my poor assumption 4ian You have a nice project happening there and I am a big supporter of all things open source. I am also hoping that you derive more "inspiration" from C2 for future features of GDevelop !

I don't really use Unity any more, as I have moved onto Godot for 3D, but I do keep up with the general news and forums. My impression is that Unity is developing at a very slow rate and yes, they definitely should have incorporated a visual event system by now, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Playmaker has been the best selling asset for a long while, so it is amazing they didn't hire Hutong to create it natively for them like they did with the developer of NGui (for the new GUI system).

If you want to see fast development, then check out the progress of UE4....wow that is moving at an insanely fast rate that is helped by having a pseudo open source model with community code contributions, as well as it being the inhouse engine for Epic. At this rate Unity will most likely always be playing catchup. Also keep an eye on Godot, as it is growing fast and will be very competitive to Unity in coming years. Also watchout Gamemaker, as Godot's 2d is very powerful as well. Currently no visual scripting so C2 has nothing to fear

There are already quite a few visual editors for Unity, but none that are as easy to use as C2. This one based on Scratch(also used in Stencyl) is about the closest you will find:

http://www.plyoung.com/plyblox/index.html

I haven't used it, so I have no idea what it is like and there is not much feedback on the store. There is also the well known Playmaker, which some people swear by, but is not really my cup of tea and uScript which is more like Blueprints in UE4.

The only game IDE's that have scripting in the style of C2 are MMF/Fusion (which C2 took it's inspiration from) and GDevelop (which is a shameless rip of C2, just not as good , but does do native desktop export and is free/open source).

If you are after a vector art tool that works in the browser, also check out Gravit, which is quite impressive. There is also a downloadable free version:

http://hub.gravit.io/browser/

Ah..ok, just realised they can't be nested into folders! Would be good to state this in the readme file

I haven't tried this since v1, so I have downloaded v2.2 but can't get them to show up in C2(v190). Have put the 2 Q3d v2.2 unzipped folders(behaviours and plugins) into the usual exporters/html5/plugins folder but I just get a "can't load plugin" error for them at startup. The old v1 plugin still shows up if I put it back in.

What am I doing wrong?

Wow, I don't read these forums much any more as I have mostly moved onto other engines, but it is very sad to hear the current state of affairs, as I still have a lot of love for C2. When you have 2 of your most high profile users (Aurel and Squiddster) nervous about releasing their games, Scirra really needs to have a rethink about the direction of the product.

I realise that native exports have been a hot topic forever on these forums, but I really think that C2 needs to be spawned off into another product that caters for this. Keep the HTML5 version but spin off the IDE into another that does exports using something something like Haxe or SFML. Yes, this will require a rewrite, but surely Scirra must be making some decent coin these days with the thousand of users and can afford to hire an extra dev or 2. The IDE and solid workflow is already established , but the exporters must be made a priority, even if it takes a year of rewrites. HTML5 is just not the ideal format yet, unless the web is your final destination, and even then it can be iffy at times.

Competing products Stencyl and GDevelop are both from solo devs, and have managed both native and web exports, so I can't believe Scirra could not pull this off. Hopefully there is a rethink in 2015! Oh, and Merry Christmas to the excellent Scirra community

I only recently found out about this free tool, which is new on the scene. Not only does it allow animated sprite creation via hierarchical layers, it also does procedural tilemap generation. Very interesting tool and I am just scratching the surface of it's capabilities.

http://www.vitruality.com/2014/08/spartan-v1-0-small-pixel-art-animator/

http://www.vitruality.com/2014/11/spartan-v1-2-procjam-edition/

v1 of Godot engine has just been released! See here for more info:

http://www.godotengine.org/wp/godot-engine-reaches-1-0-releases-first-stable/

Yeah Mulab is great, I have the full version and the Mux vst plugin that I use inside Reaper. MUlab is better at MIDI than audio though, depending on your needs the free version may be all you need. If you have $60 to spend, Reaper is the most powerful DAW for your dollar, though not the easiest to use for a beginner:

http://reaper.fm/

Another free option to consider is Studio One free....not that I have tried it, as I have the full version but prefer Reaper.

The motherlode of all free DAW and VST plugin links is at Bedroom Producers Blog, which is a great site:

http://bedroomproducersblog.com/

This would no doubt be of interest to C2 devs, since Humble is now starting to sell HTML5 games( along with their DRM and Steam equivalents) in this bundle. Even though I already have most of these games on Steam, I will be picking this up.....I hadn't even heard of Voxatron before this, and it is very cool. Check out the demos, to see how surprisingly well these games play in a browser.

Considering that Osmos is created entirely procedurally (including all of its graphics, as they are not premade sprites), it is amazing to see how well it plays in the browser. Voxatron uses a voxel engine and it flies even on my crappy browsing laptop. Impressive to see how well these asm.js versions are fairing!

https://www.humblebundle.com/