BLURB - Construct 2

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BLURB - Construct 2
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Construct 2 by Scirra

I have been testing this software for a couple of days (spending a few hours in total) and I have come to the conclusion that Construct 2 is pretty darn good if you want to make games quickly without the need to write long complex code.

https://www.scirra.com/construct2

So what is Construct 2? (As described on Scirra website)
With Construct 2 making games is a piece of cake: just drag and drop objects around, add behaviors to them, and make everything come alive with events!
With a quick and easy to grasp Ribbon interface, you have clear access to a wide set of tools that allows anyone to jump into game creation with little to no prior game development knowledge.

Make your game do what it needs to do in a visual and human readable way with the powerful Event System. There’s no need to memorize complicated and cryptic languages. With events programming becomes intuitive putting your focus on what really matters: designing your game!

Behaviors work as pre-packaged functions that you can assign to objects and reuse whenever needed. They provide an instant way to add capabilities to objects, speeding up development and increasing productivity. They include movements such as 8 directions, platform, and car; advanced features like physics and pathfinding; and useful utilities like fade, flash, wrap, pin and drag & drop.

In Construct 2 you can preview your games instantly at any time. There’s no need to wait for compiling or other time consuming processes. In the press of a button you get your game running in a browser window ready to be tested.

There are over 70 WebGL-based pixel shader effects to warp, distort, blend, blur, mask, re-color and more. You can add these to objects, layers and layouts for quick special effects and also stack them up to create incredible results.

Easily reach the web by publishing to your own website, Chrome Web Store, Facebook, Kongregate, NewGrounds, Firefox Marketplace or use our Scirra Arcade to share your creations. Export your game to desktop PC, Mac and Linux apps by using the Node-Webkit wrapper. Additionally publish to Windows 8 Store or as a native Windows Phone 8 app.

You can also reach the popular iOS and Android app stores using wrappers with built-in support.

Construct 2 comes with more than 20 built-in plugins, over 20 behaviors and more than 70 visual effects. They range from displaying text and sprites, sound and music playback, input, data manipulation and storage, particle effects, movement presets, Photoshop-like effects, and many more.

If you are a power user and still needs some specific functionality, Construct 2 let you create your own plugins and behaviors using our fully documented Javascript SDK. You can also create your own visual effects using GLSL shader language.




Review:

I have always had an interest in making games but never really had the time to get in to it. Creating games is a long and complex process if you're building them from scratch using any programming language or software such as Unity which really requires a lot of work to be put in to coding the game logic and algorithms. I am and will always be a coder at heart and I would recommend to anyone who is serious about game development to go down the coding route, your games will always be better when made from scratch using the code you create and design to bring your game(s) to life the way YOU imagined it to be.

However, for those who don't have the time to code all that game logic and just want to make games, Construct 2 will be perfect for you.

The UI is clean and simple to understand with minimal options to configure and everything else is simple drag & drop. Of course you can customize a lot of the built in modules and create your own if you want to create more complex games but you can create amazing games using the modules bundled with Construct 2 straight away.

I had a play with it and eventually created a simple clicker game in just a few hours. Obviously I haven’t had time to create any dazzling graphics for the game but at least the game works and it shows how easy it is to create your own.

Let me walk you through creating a very basic clicker game that you can make in just a few minutes.

So first I installed and loaded construct 2 and created a new project:


You’re presented with a blank project layout so what we first need to do is add a sprite to our game, I created a simple green block sprite. Simply right click on “Object Types” and select “Insert new object”




Using the same process I then added a smaller red block sprite and I added a Mouse and Text object:


The Text object is going to be used to display our score and the Mouse object is what we’ll use as user input to control/play our game.

To let the game have some movement I selected the red block and by clicking on the behaviours tab on the left side of the screen I added the “Bullet” behaviour to it. This is primarily used when making shooting games but can be used for whatever your imagination can come up with.



Now we have our basic game layout set up we now need to tell the game what we want it to do. So move over to the “Event Sheet” tab.


We need our game to keep score so add a global variable called “Score” with a value of “0”

Now we need to add our game logic and user input. Click the “Add Event” label and select the Mouse object. We want to know when the user clicked the green block so select “Object Clicked” and choose the green block sprite.


Now we need to tell it what happens when we click the green block, click “Add Action” next to the event we just created and this time select the green block, then choose “Spawn Another Object” and select the red block.



So far so good.
Now we create another event by clicking “Add Event” and this time select the red block followed by “On Created”


The next thing we need to do is tell the game what we want to happen when the red block is created so once again choose “Add Action”, select the red block and this time choose “Set Angle” and enter the following in to the angle box:

random(0,360)



We need to add more actions to this event to update the score and display it in the text object.

Select “Add Action” > “System” > “Add To” – we want to update the global variable Score when an object is created so choose Score from the drop down box.


Select “Add Action” > “Text” > “Set Text” – we want to display the score in the text object so type “Score” in to the set text field box.


And that is it. Your final event sheet should look like this:


You can now run and test your game in your browser.

Simple.

You can download the .CAPX file for this basic game from the link below, just open it with Construct 2.
http://www.codenstuff.com/cnssoftware/clickergame.capx

You can also play the exported game here:
http://www.codenstuff.com/clicktest/

Granted this was a very basic game but once you know your way around Construct 2 you’ll be able to do this in just a few minutes and if you can make this in just a few minutes imagine what you could create in a few hours, days, weeks. I have seen loads of amazing games made with this software and many have had great success on Android, iPhone and even Steam.
Create something amazing.

Construct 2 comes in 3 forms

Free edition – Some limitations exist but you can still create and export your games.
Personal Edition – cost £79.99 all features enabled.
Business Edition – Cost £259.99 this is only needed if your games make more than $5,000 in sales.

https://www.scirra.com/construct2
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smashapps
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Re: BLURB - Construct 2
smashapps
Glad to see others on the forum have an interest in Scirra as well.

I have stopped using it for now because they are working on Scirra 3. Plenty of new features and updates. Can't wait!

"Construct 3 works in Chrome on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS. There's nothing to install — it's as simple as visiting a website"

"A Construct 3 Personal subscription will be $99/year. This covers all export platforms.
Existing licensed Construct 2 users (including on Steam) will get 50% off their first year.
Anyone who buys Construct 2 from today until Construct 3's release will get their first year of Construct 3 for free. To make it a no-brainer, we're also putting Construct 2 on sale for $99. So there's no reason to wait!
If they choose, our existing Education users will be able to upgrade to Construct 3 for the remainder of their license period at no additional cost.
We will still have a basic free edition of Construct 3."

So current users of Scirra 2 will get a massive discount on Scirra 3 :)

https://www.scirra.com/blog/183/announcing-construct-3
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CodenStuff
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Re: BLURB - Construct 2
CodenStuff
I think Construct 3 will be good but I have to say that I'm not impressed with the subscription model they're putting in place for it.

I prefer to buy and own it rather than paying a annual subscription fee in order to use it.

I mean what happens to people who can only afford to purchase C3 once then they work really hard on their game, put out some demos, get good pre-release reviews, they've put a lot of work and money in to creating their game but it takes them just over a year to complete it. They find themselves with no money to pay the subscription fee in order to publish the game they've work so long and hard on.

I just don't understand why they feel the need to do a subscription model rather than a one time payment. If this is the route they want to take then in my opinion they should make the full version of C3 completely FREE allowing people to build and test their games locally and instead just charge a small fee each time you want to publish and release your game.

Still, I look forward to seeing what C3 has to offer upon release :)
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CodenStuff
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Re: BLURB - Construct 2
CodenStuff
I think you can actually try the BETA of Construct 3 now here:
https://www.construct.net/gb
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