Yesterday we released r99 beta of Construct 2. Since we'll soon be releasing our 100th version of Construct 2, let's take a moment to look back at the history of Scirra, and talk a little about the future of Scirra too.
We've always advocated "release early, release often". Construct 2 has been in development for approximately two years now, and 100 releases means consistently releasing a new version about once a week during that time. (Note the first 20 releases were in a private beta, and releases older than r45 don't show up in our archive because they pre-dated our new website and were just posted to the forum.)
We strongly believe regular releases have been of enormous benefit to Construct 2. With such a quick feedback-and-release turnaround we can make changes and get them in to the hands of users incredibly quickly. Users can then make other suggestions and work out the problems, and then get a new version a few days later. This helps us get lots of well-tested new features in to our approximately six-weekly stable releases. Plus the regular update schedule seems to have been pretty popular, judging from some of the great release comments!
Here are some random statistics:
- Over 900 changelog items in the past year's worth of builds
- Over 1000 user-reported bugs closed
- Nearly 1 million plays on the Scirra Arcade
- Over 185,000 downloads of Construct 2 to date
Tom's put together an awesome timeline infographic covering the history of the company. Scroll to the bottom of the post to see it!
What's planned for r100?
We've got some exciting plans for the 100th release of Construct 2. To mark the occasion, we will be releasing some great new features:
- Publish iOS and Android apps with native-like performance using Construct 2. This involves dropping the 'experimental' tags from the CocoonJS and directCanvas exporters and having them ready for production use. Please note this depends on certain moves on appMobi and Ludei's parts so we can't guarantee this for certain, but even if we miss the r100 target we hope it will still follow soon after!
- WebGL shaders as well as support for CSS filter effects where WebGL is not supported. This will allow for native-grade hardware-accelerated visual effect processing - just like Construct Classic had. CSS filter effects provide a more limited set of effects for systems which don't support WebGL. They currently only work in Chrome (try this CSS filter effects demo in Chrome), but support has also been announced for iOS 6, meaning you'll be able to use a few effects in web games on iOS as well.
- Windows desktop exporter (also known as the EXE exporter), powered by Awesomium. It has improved performance (even faster than the Chrome browser!) and even supports fullscreen games (including letterbox) through the Browser object's 'Request fullscreen' action. It also has other benefits like WebGL forced enabled for all computers for the best performance and features, which also means you can rely on WebGL shaders always being available too. Depending on how the development schedule goes, we may also be able to release Mac and Linux desktop app exporters as well.
Changes in the Store
Given Construct 2's increasing capabilities, including publishing to a diverse range of platforms, we feel it's an appropriate time to announce changes to the price of Construct 2 licenses. When r100 is released we will be increasing the cost of a Personal license to $119 / €99 / £79, and a Business license will cost $399 / €329 / £259.
If you already have a license, or you buy before r100, you'll get the upgrade included for free! So if you've been holding off, now's a great time to make a purchase - and if you already have a license, you'll be getting all the above new features without having to pay anything extra.
Release 100 is likely to take more work than usual, and will most likely arrive some time in August. We guarantee the new pricing won't be introduced before 27th July, to allow a clear 2 weeks for you to purchase before the new pricing is introduced. Don't forget we're also currently running the Favourite Features competition where you can win a Construct 2 license as well!
Looking forwards
We aim to make Construct 2 the game creator for all platforms: design your game once, and export it everywhere. With our upcoming exporters you'll be able to publish to mobile, desktop, and the web. Since it's also all the same HTML5 codebase and not re-written ports, you also have a strong guarantee the game will function identically with the same core functionality available everywhere. Existing games will also likely already be highly portable to new platforms as well, although bear in mind there will always be some platforms missing features that are supported by others (WebGL being a notable example). However we aim to make porting existing games to new platforms as smooth and helpful as possible, for example pointing out where you used features that are not available.
And to finish - here's the timeline we mentioned earlier. Enjoy!