5 days ago I got a sale of one one of my assets (36 5x7 Tiny Sprite Font + Kerning) and straight away asked for a refund. Pissed off as usual, since it happened already in the past, but hey, that's Construct's Store policy to allow refund. I don't like it, but it's there.

Today I got 290 sales of the same asset, again an obvious fake sale as it happened already time ago, but never seen so big.

Anyone else have been targeted?

I start to get annoyed about these and then have to deal with all the refund with no justification...

HVR7 because there are projects of different types and developers with different skills, I suggest you to add details about the kind of game you want to develop. In this way you will have more chance to be contacted by the person that fits better the role.

Also, don't forget to specify if the position is paid or not and if paid, in which way.

Ruskul I understand your frustration when something doesn't work as you want, but let's be honest. If you don't like so much the engine, then better to move on something else, especially since C3 has a subscription model.

Forgive my question, but did you ever had a business? Even a small one? I had 2 in the past and now I have my third one as indie solo studio. From your sentence here, it doesn't seems that you understand what means to run a business, especially if in the case of Scirra, you have lots of clients to take care about.

Adding such a joint was only like 10 lines of code, but it was never added to c2 despite a fair number of people asking for it. But I added it to my project and dealt with it.

With my current business I work on my games, work as freelancer, develop assets and templates. At the moment I am busy with a client since 10 months, I barely work on my games and I haven't developed or updated any of my templates and assets.

It would take me just an hour per day to release an asset per week, though I have no free time for it. Why? Because I am too busy with other stuff, so that '10 lines of code' or a 32x32 pixel art sprite or whatever, can't be created because there is no time for it.

Can I hire another person to do it? Yes, of course. Do I not only recover cost, but make enough income to justify to hire another person for these little tasks, that I have anyway to spend time to explain how to do it? No, especially since it takes more time to explain what is needed, rather than do it. So there is no benefit sometime in scaling up the business, and therefore some things are delayed.

About sorting objects and functions, I still don't understand what's wrong, can't you type and search them as I have already posted earlier? I have no problem in finding objects even with lots of nested folder. Just type the name in the search and it will filter everything else out, like this:

Ruskul Thanks for the details about scalability. I understand now what you mean, though, I agree with skymen that you can't expect Construct to be as another language, because that's the way it's build.

You need to use the right tool for the job you want to do. So, yeah, if you want to do a 3D MMORPG, Construct isn't the best tool to use, but for "middle" difficulty projects, I think an expert user can still mitigate the drawbacks of Construct with the experience.

Your example for a complex platformer is clear, I have experienced something like that working for some clients. Yes, it's a bit complex, but still doable. To me, as far as I know, it's still faster than code the game from scratch, even if sometime I spend 1 or 2 hours on one issue, overall the time spent for the whole project is still worth compared to do everything from scratch.

So we have to balance 3 things:

1) Understand the limit of the engine

2) Understand the experience of the developer with the engine

3) Understand the complexity of the game

Can you put a nail in a wood board with a screwdriver? Yes, but it's not so easy.

Should you try to put the nail in the board with the screwdriver? It depends.

Do you have an hammer just next to you? If no, and you have to drive two hours to the closed depo and come back, to buy a hammer, would you try with the screwdriver?

It depends on your experience, if you have already hammered a nail with a screwdriver many times, it might be worth to invest 1 minute in doing it, if not, and you plan to hammer a lot in your life in the future, better go to buy the hammer.

So, a lot come down to personal experience. For example, for multiplayer games, I started to develop a reusable event sheet. The main program call a function and the function call the events in the multiplayer event sheets. Yes, it's a double call, but it let me use generic multiplayer code for more than one project.

For audio management, I have a standalone event sheet, and I reuse it for all projects that require to play audio with music/sfx on/off and setting their volume according to the options.

While you might have obvious issues with the increase number of object in the projects that let you waste time in picking among those, you can still have benefit of using groups, events or even variables to enable/disable part of code or recycle it.

By the way, if you organise objects in folders, when adding a new condition or action, you can simply type its name to filter out all the other objects and that is pretty much the same time as writing code, if not faster. This is present in both C2 and C3, so having too many objects to filter, isn't really a big deal, unless I have misunderstood what you meant.

Biim;

The main point about RPG maker is their users don't ever finish any games and put them on Steam. They might fantasize about making a living writing games but they pay for a platform that doesn't require programming and has a very poor success rate at making you a game published star.

yours

winkr7

Then it ends on the usual way. It's not an engine problem, it's a skill problem.

If you are skilled and dedicated enough, you can even create an RPG in Basic.

The benefit of the engine is what brings outside of the box, for sure RPG Maker give you a great base for that, on the other hand, Constructs has lots of native movement plugins that are great for other type of games without being able to code much.

Do you want to create a shoot'em up? That's super easy with Construct. You just need Bullet and 8-direction behavior and you have already a great % of the game done even before starting.

Scirra isn't going to steal users away from Unity and Godot easily -- but they can get the RPG maker community easily. There are very few RPG maker based games out there and yet they have a great many users who only ask for a non programming environment -- with with with ... a decent set of starter graphics and sounds.

If you say your strength is to make games without having to program then spending lots of time on tweaks to the JS script is a poor use of time compared to getting people who want to make games without programming with some packaged assets and solid expandable examples that do the dungeon crawl or space opera.

It would take a month, some portraits and some tiles.

yours

winkr7

I'm developing an RPG for a client, working part time. It's not really a simple task, especially starting from zero. It has been 10 months so far and we are getting something out now. I think that RPG maker still has an advantage on Construct, being focused only on that part and having loads of things ready.

Yes, you can have a template, but from a template to customise it to make it your RPG it takes time, in addition to experience. No much a novice can do, unless we are just talking about replacing art and text and keep game mechanics as they are.

While I agree that Construct can be improved in many things, I really can't complain about it, because honestly, without it, I would be still dreaming about making a game, or trying to do something with old Basic.

Scirra is a small company, well, that's not something bad. I mean, that could just employ 50+ more people and bankrupt straight away, because before getting the monetary benefit to pay someone fulltime, you need to sell a lot.

I have find many time situations where trying to do something with events is not working and is more complicated than a single code line, but hey, overall I still save lots of time. Yes, improving those inefficiency or weird cases would be of course beneficial for everyone, Scirra, developers and even players.

I have been using C2 and C3 for a total of 10 years now. Yes, I haven't developed great games, but I still don't get the point where some users says that C3 is not scalable. Since "scalable" is a term that can be used in many situations, could you provide me some examples so it's easier to understand what's wrong?

Again, I know some issues are annoying, but once you know the engine you can still work around those with events. I never used JS, aside for a big project in collaboration with someone working in the backend that supervise that, but I don't need so far JS, aside for a couple of experiment I tried with C2.

One example of annoying thing is that once you create an object, you need to wait one tick before being able to treat it as family. Yes it's annoying, but once you know you can make it work. I have some cases where I uses those problems as not intended way to obtain what I need.

About multiplayer, for the little things I made, it works. It might be tricky sometimes, but so far works.

I agree very much on the fact that letting choose to the community what develop next, would help users to get gratified, especially since it's a subscription program and people wants to feel part of it. Maybe 1 out of 5 new things could come from users' suggestions. If we want to avoid new joining users to make unreasonable requests, the vote/suggestion could be limited to users that own construct for at least 1-2+ years.

That's kind of expected. But on the other hand, if I were in just for the money I'd stop using Construct and start a dropshipping company. Also, there are other ways to make money apart from directly monetizing youtube.

Yes, of course. I never planned to be rich just making Construct tutorials, and even adding other form of monetisation on YouTube is not worth. I'll be back to go back to make tutorials as soon I'll be free again, lately I'm quite busy.

My goal is to use Construct to make a living with my childhood dream job, and I can't complain about it since I'm actually living only thanks to game development at the moment.

> Overall I think most of the issues people have been complaining can be solved by Brackeys type community members teaching people about the software and writing tools to cover more and more blind spots.

I agree with the above point - construct lacks people like brackeys and codemonkey, but I also think the few out there making tutorials dont have a large enough audience to justify making tutorials. Its a chicken egg thing. Well made videos are a TON of work and you need enough users to care... I keep thinking of giving it a go (mostly on SOLID principles and how they apply to construct), but...

Alot of what makes good coding practices good are difficult to apply to construct. Which is my biggest trouble with it for larger games and why i only really prototype concepts. I must admit, I've been using custom plugins for variables since a month after starting to use construct and globals 2.0 is great. Managing scope in c3 compared to c# is night and day though. I can write code quite easily that I never have to look at again in unity. Making abstract complex framworks is cumbersome, especially when you can't prevent their misuse in the future if you forgot what variables and functions are for what.

I made quite a few video Tutorials for Construct, both in Italian and in English.

Unfortunately numbers are not there to even start to monetise, since YouTube place an unbelievable threshold to start to monetise. The channel must have at least 1000 subscribers AND a total of 4,000 hours watched of public video in the last 365 days. That means that with tutorials, that are usually short, it takes forever.

I have courses that are a series of longer tutorials, but even though I can't reach it. The only way to do it is to make video every day, but that's not worth the money.

And by the way, even if I you can't monetise, YouTube still puts ads on your videos, so they make 100% of money and they give you 0% share. So to conclude, it's not worth that for making money.

I forgot to mention, also a section or link to YouTube channel where you interview developers that have completed those games would be great. Show how the team is in connections with the developers and gather their experience on working with Construct.

What was easy, what was their challenge, what they achieved, what's coming next and so on.

It will be a good collaboration for both Scirra and developers since both will get a boost in marketing promotion.

Leaving the price aside, since it has already been discussed many times, I think that the real problem of Construct is their use base itself.

The way majority of games published with Construct are silly mobile or browser games, and that's what someone that hear about Construct sees. If I am using a different engine or I never programmed and I want to develop my big dream game, I will not be interested in an engine that mostly create endless clicking games or clone of other simple games like Flappy Bird.

I've been using Construct since 10 years now, and I am still amazed about what I can bring it out from it, and not only from C3, I still keep using C2 for many of my projects too and it's still great!

Yes, a new user will never end up in creating their MMORPG with Construct, but they will never do it either with any other engine, because they lack of experience more than it be an engine limitation. So, you need to show well what can be achieved if you stick with Construct at the very beginning of your page. The rotating cube is nice, but if you don't keep looking at it, you can really see the good games like The Next Penelope or Mighty Goose. I think a slideshow underneath it, if you want to keep the cube, of other good looking games is good to have, especially if you can click and see 1-2 minutes of gameplay.

I think you can also include some of the games done with C2, in the end you can say "If this was achieved with C2, can you imagine what you can make with C3?".

There a few games that are graphically astonishing, and since we know that the eye wants its part, I would add those at the very beginning of the homepage. Videos of games like Remote Life, Cyber Shadow and Klang will make a huge difference. These are published games on Steam, so new users can see what is achievable completing a game with Construct.

Hi Andreas (Uriel1339),

Yes, I'm definitely interested in talking about the project.

I love turn based RPGs and I started to play D&D since its first edition 30 years ago, so you can understand that I'm into these type of things.

I have checked out Conclave and for most of those things it shouldn't be a problem to be developed with Construct. The only thing that might (or might not) be difficult depends on how you want to hand the multiplayer.

Please contact me with more details.

My website is biim.games you can find my contact there.

Thank you,

Simone

I have an idea to make a turn based RPG in the style of 'Conclave' here:

https://www.playconclave.com/

I have several game design aspects and attempted a prototype in the past, however my programming knowledge is limited.

If you are interested in developing it in completion with me, let me know so we can discuss monthly rate & hours, etc.

Thanks in advance!

Sincerely,

Andreas aka Uriel1339