Thoughts on Construct2?

[eddieone]

I never have enjoyed games coming from these 'no coding needed' systems. However, Construct2 appears to be more popular than Phaser. It might be the Flash IDE of HTML5 that enables a lot of people to enter the game dev space. I'm wondering who has experience with it and what are opinions about it?

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

I never have enjoyed games coming from these 'no coding needed' systems. However, Construct2 appears to be more popular than Phaser. It might be the Flash IDE of HTML5 that enables a lot of people to enter the game dev space. I'm wondering who has experience with it and what are opinions about it?

No exprience with Construct 2, but Phaser is as easy as game development could ever get.

[Daikrys]

while Phaser is highly performant on mobile, Construct 2 offers a really comfortable way to make games for various platforms. If you learn how to build Construct 2 games in an optimized way (including how to make plugins), there wont be any issue making performant games even for mobile. however, if you have a complex game that needs to run smoothly at many different mobile systems i would always recommend Phaser.

 

i take a break this year and make a desktop game to polish my skills and get some time to relax. i will use Construct 2 for its comfortably and my expierence with the program. i also thought about unity but it doesnt feel right to me for this kind of project.

 

so its basicly up to anyone what to use to make games, everything has its own pro and cons and everyone has different strengths.

[Bilge Kaan]

My all games are made with Construct 2. You can check my portfolio here: http://td2tl.com/

 

I highly recommend C2.

[webcaetano]

My all games are made with Construct 2. You can check my portfolio here: http://td2tl.com/

 

I highly recommend C2.

 

 

[offtopic]

 

I didn't know you are in this forum too.

Nice Blog BTW.

 

[/offtopic]

[fatalfluff]

In the right hands C2 is a very capable tool with good output. That said, you really need to know what you are doing, especially for mobile HTML5 games. It is super easy to do stuff with it, but making that stuff mobile-ready isn't something that it does for you. 

Insofar it's not really "dangerous". It has been blamed for enabling less capable devs to severely undercut prices for example on platforms like envato, but that's not really a problem of the system itself but more of a part of its userbase.

Only a rather small number of C2 devs can produce games that are capable of passing the big sponsors' QA requirements.

I have used it in the past for several commercial projects and go back to it now and then (mostly for prototypes).

[eddieone]

Thanks for the info.

[WombatTurkey]

Tried C2 today, but immediately went back to Phaser.  I hate how the code is literally untouchable, you can do so much more with hands on coding instead of relying on pre-defined ui buttons for actions.

 

Also, look at this gem I found:

 

https://github.com/qiciengine/qiciengine

 

 

I shouldn't say powered by Phaser, but is it using it as part of their stack.. I just think there are much better systems out there if you only want to live within an UI.

 

 

Also, I don't even think C2 has sprite atlas's.. I had to re-crop every single frame out of my main game sprite and then on top of that C2 spits them out as individual http requests (images), instead of using a main global sprite.  I think their sprite thing only works for tilemaps.

 

Having a .json file with x,y,width,height within Phaser and it does all that for me? And doing `animations.add('idle', [0, 1, 2], 25, true);` regardless of horizontal or vertical frames (Phaser does all that for u), it just cannot get more easier.  Animation is such a pain within C2 as well clicking through the gooie. I'd rather just type [0,1,2,3,4,5].

[webcaetano]

qiciengine are awesome.

They have awesome features like animation preview etc. Very detailed docs.

The creators will open the source code soon.

 

I suggest they to improve the installation method, to enable to install it via command line. Since it have an package.json

[Bilge Kaan]

Tried C2 today, but immediately went back to Phaser.  I hate how the code is literally untouchable, you can do so much more with hands on coding instead of relying on pre-defined ui buttons for actions.

 

 

You can write your own plugin with JS and effects with GLSL. You're not limited with official plugins and there are lots of custom plugins on the forum.

 

https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk

 

90% of the time I don't use the mouse in C2 events, it's really fast and like coding. https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/1365/how-to-code-faster-in-construct-2

 

Also here's an article about sprite exports in C2: https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/577/construct-2s-export-time-optimisations

 

I think you should check the manual again before giving up on C2.

[eddieone]

I ask out of curiosity and also because id.net was looking into making a C2 plugin despite already having a JS SDK. They have decided to move forward and make it. WombatTurky, you kinda lost focus of the original question. It's ok though, I blame ADHD

[WombatTurkey]

You can write your own plugin with JS and effects with GLSL. You're not limited with official plugins and there are lots of custom plugins on the forum.

 

https://www.scirra.com/manual/15/sdk

 

90% of the time I don't use the mouse in C2 events, it's really fast and like coding. https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/1365/how-to-code-faster-in-construct-2

 

Also here's an article about sprite exports in C2: https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/577/construct-2s-export-time-optimisations

 

I think you should check the manual again before giving up on C2.

 

 

Honestly, by the time I would start to familiarize myself with their own API I would be asking myself, why am I using a interface driven engine then?  

 

Also, their event tab worries me. What if your game has thousand's of event, I would have to search through that event tab? It would take forever. I guess at that point, you would be switching to CS2's JS SDk, but then I'm back to square one! 

[Son of Bryce]

I really love Construct 2. For me, it just makes it easy and fun to make games. Without have to worry about digging in code and all sorts of technical issues that involves. I think if you spend some time to get familiar with it's design and its limitations, it's easy to design great stuff with it. Really quickly.

 

I've never been a fan of Game Makers interface, in comparison. It's very capable but the interface is ancient feeling and counterintuitive to me. I think that is Construct 2 is more streamlined and easier to get into. But the main difference is that Construct 2 just exports HTML games. You can wrap them or whatever, but Game Maker supports many more executable formats off the bat.

 

The free version of Construct is good enough to get an idea if you'd like it. I think Game Maker has a similar free option or demo. See for yourself!