As we approach the end of another year, it's a good time to look back and review the year gone by. We got a lot done in 2021 and we're excited to keep it up through 2022!
There's also our previous review of 2020 if you want to go back further, too.
Construct updates
Through 2021 we made 58 releases of Construct - just over one a week - covering r230 to r276.2. As ever you can find all the details on the releases page, but here are some of the highlights!
New 3D features
This year we introduced a raft of exciting new 3D features! While Construct remains primarily a 2D engine, the new 3D features open up a wide range of new creative possibilities, and even types of games that look fully 3D.
The new 3D features include the new 3D Shape objct, the 3D Camera object, pointer lock for 3D mouse look, 3D mesh distortion (allowing for a simple form of 3D modelling), adjusting the vanishing point to suit your game's style, and a new orthographic projection mode allowing a new way to make isometric and other pseudo-3D style games.
See our blog post Explore new 3D features with Construct's 3D Camera for more. We've also written a tutorial Using 3D in Construct with more information on how to use these features.
Mesh editor
Our mesh distortion feature allows splitting objects like Sprites in to a grid of points and moving the points around to distort them. This year we also added a mesh editor so you can use mesh distortion in the Layout View, such as to use it to design levels! See our blog post Have you heard about meshes? for more.
Sub-layers
In a big update to the way layers work in Construct, we just added in the latest release support for sub-layers. Check out our blog post More efficient and more advanced effects with sub-layers for more.
Loads of new examples
Thanks to our friends at Viridino Studios, we've been regularly adding lots of great new examples to Construct, many showing off the latest features such as the new 3D capabilities, and all available for free in the Start Page. Have a search through the Start Page examples and see what's new. This year we added an amazing 96 examples just from Viridino Studios! The thumbnails below are all from the new examples added in 2021.
Thumbnails of examples added through 2021A rewritten effects system
This year the effects compositor in Construct was also completely rewritten. This was a big internal upgrade to a major part of Construct that was years-old and running in to the limits of what it could do. The rewrite appeared to improve performance and also allowed us to add new effect capabilities, such as new depth-based 3D effects like Fog.
A 3D fog effect now available in the latest releaseNew lightweight desktop exporters
This year we also introduced two new lightweight desktop exporters: the Windows WebView2 export option, and the macOS WKWebView export option. These don't support every single feature that NW.js does, but they cover most of what browsers can do, and they have a tiny file size overhead too. Learn more in the tutorials Exporting to Windows with the WebView2 wrapper and Exporting to macOS with the WKWebView wrapper to learn more.
Scripting support for JavaScript Modules
We upgraded Construct's scripting support to allow using JavaScript Modules, allowing the use of import and export statements. Part 12 of the Learn JavaScript in Construct tutorial series covers modules, which you can read here to learn more.
Timeline improvements
The Timelines animation feature gained several new capabilities this year. These include proper support for scene-graph hierarchies, value-only tracks to control value parameters like volume during the timeline, and audio tracks too.
Lots more
There was even more new - here's a run-down of a few more highlights:
- Scene-graph improvements, including support for creating entire hierarchies at runtime, and a new select mode in the editor
- Tilemaps support for auto-tiling at runtime
- Independent layer scrolling
- Importing animated image formats like GIF and APNG
- New languages for the editor: Croatian, German and Hungarian
This is still just a summary, and there was lots more! For all the details, check out the releases page for releases that came out this year.
Website updates
Tom has been working hard as ever on the website, and this year we launched an all-new Construct Asset Store which has been a bustling market for Construct users throughout the year. You can read more about it in our blog post New Construct Asset Store launched from February this year, and you can visit the Asset Store here.
There have also been lots of design updates to various parts of the site over this year. If you haven't checked the site for a while, have a click around and see what's new!
As part of a years-long project to migrate from Scirra.com to Construct.net, we also finally said goodbye to Scirra.com.
Blog posts
We published several blog posts covering some of this year's new features, including meshes, scene graph, new 3D features and sub-layers. We also highlighted the advantages of JavaScript in How JavaScript beats GameMaker Language (GML), including far superior performance, many more features, and being an industry-standard language with many jobs available. On the more technical side, a blog on Porting WebGL shaders to WebGPU, based on our work with the latest web graphics technology WebGPU, saw a lot of interest from the wider technical community.
Laura has also done an excellent series of Developer Diaries blog posts with interesting interviews with various Construct developers. These include blogs about:
Do check them out if you missed them - there's lots of great insights in there!
Conferences
The team also attended a few conferences this year, mostly focusing on the education world. Given the circumstances this year some of these were virtual. These included:
- ISTE 2021 in June
- CSTA in July
- ACTE Visions in December
We also gave several presentations to school districts, teacher groups and more. We're continuing to expand our efforts in education so if you're interested in conferences in the area, look out for us at more events next year!
Learn JavaScript guide
Over a few months we've been building up a free guide to help anyone learn to code in JavaScript with Construct, and we just recently finished it! Here's our 13-part tutorial series Learn JavaScript in Construct which could be your first step in to the world of programming - and who knows, maybe even a future career.
More to come next year!
We've got a great deal done this year, ranging from loads of new Construct features, to conferences and new learning materials. The team will be taking a well-earned break over the next couple of weeks, so please note support will be limited and it may take longer for us to get back to you, and there won't be any new beta releases for a couple of weeks. We will be back to full steam ahead in early January, where we will get back to work on the plenty of exciting things we have in the pipeline, and we're looking forwards to making Construct even better through 2022!