Why would you even program html5 games?

[The_dude8080]

Hello. I have heard of construct2. I see good games being made there very easily with no need to know any programming languages... What are the disadvantages of using construct 2 ?

[ozdy]

Many of us knew programming before switching to making HTML5 games and some sponsors require implementations of some API's and knowing Javascript helps a lot.

[blackmoondev]

Let me try to answer that question, since my team and I (three people together) have made around 80 C2 games and make a living of it for the last 3-4 years. 
So:

"You can make good games using C2" - that's true

"You can make good games using C2 easily" - that depends. You need to learn the tool first (as any). It's much easier for us to make C2 games now, but it wasn't so easy at the beginning.

"You can make games in C2 without knowing how to program" - that's true

" You can make good games in C2 without knowing how to program" - nope, you still need to know how to put it all together and without knowing some programming patterns and algorithms you won't be able to make certain things in your game. 

Disadvanteges of C2:

- some publishers claim they won't buy C2 games (for various reasons)

- if you would like to make a really big project, C2 could get hard to understand and untangle after a certain "critical mass" 

- there are certain bugs and problems with C2 that might show up - and usually that would require hacks form your end (C2 support is not really that interested in fixing very specific and niche bugs that only affect a super small percentage of developers)

 

[Nulligma]

2 hours ago, The_dude8080 said:

Hello. I have heard of construct2. I see good games being made there very easily with no need to know any programming languages... What are the disadvantages of using construct 2 ?

If you are young you can learn new stuff easily. In the future who knows what new language will take over HTML5 and once you get comfortable in making games without programming it will be really hard for you to learn programming and make a switch.

[OkijinGames]

I had over 10 years of experience working with C/C++ and C#, worked a few years as software architect and technical lead in the financial sector so it was not an issue for me to adopt HTML5/Javacript for my first game project - writing everything from scratch.

I can see the appeal of highly abstracted tools and if you know nothing about programming then it is perfectly valid to start but as said above you may need to dig deeper to meet the specific requirements of your projects.

The main disadvantage is that when a problem specific to your project cannot be solved at the level of abstraction provided by the tools you use then you must find a way to either work around it or work at lower level and you may sometimes find yourself confronted to a black box making things even harder to solve than if you had to write everything from scratch.