Show HN: Construct 3 – Make games in the browser
construct.net
construct.net
We primarily work with Scratch, but are always looking for a good "next step" for kids interested in publishing more ambitious games outside of the Scratch sandbox. We've tried a few downloadable engines or pure coding environments (e.g. Stencyl, Gamemaker, Phaser, Corona, Unity), but run into problems with the learning curve and installations.
Being web-based is a great advantage for Construct 3 in education. In our school district (NYC), students share laptops on carts and rely on Google Drive for storage. If you have additional information regarding your roll-out plans for the education market, please let me know. I could speak to some administrators at various schools and also teachers working with the csnyc.org initiative.
Always happy to chat about this stuff, feel free to email me on tom@scirra.com if you have any specific questions and if there's anything we can do to encourage administrators to give us a go.
Our biggest problem has always been that it was Windows-only. I'm super excited to see that Construct 3 for the web has finally launched. (Finally, we can use Chromebooks!)
Congrats!
We are so relieved to hear this, after 3 years work this was always front and centre of our goals.
> I couldn't see use of any framework or library, is this all custom?
Yes, all custom built
> What platforms will Construct 3 support exporting to
Exports HTML5 games, which can be wrapped in various ways to run on Win/Linux/Apple desktops, iOS, Android, Steam, FB etc etc. List goes on!
> plans for supporting the Nintendo Switch?
Would love to, but we know as much as anyone else about the Switch at this stage. If anyone from Nintendo reads this please reach out!
Look at this UX: https://www.construct.net/ca/make-games/features it's a long list of links, all text, and you have to click each one to see the block of text.
Looking forward to a video of the new product. I watched one of the 2nd version and it looked interesting.
We're going to be making a couple of small adjustments, but so far everything is how we expected it to be.
You should consider doing what newspapers always do, offer an expensive high-end package that you don't expect anyone to buy, then offer a reasonably priced primary version which comes with a big (seeming) yearly discount. Then include a more expensive monthly option.
There's some great books on the subject of pricing. I recommend this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Pricing-Businesses-Innovation-P...
https://www.construct.net/ca/make-games/buy-construct-3
It's telling me it's in beta.
Won't be available to buy until beta is over.
However, as things are right now, it seems that the time has come for me to part with Construct. I do web development for a living, and game development is something I do for fun on the side mostly for my own enjoyment these days. The limitations of the C2 Free Edition were too much for me (as a programmer even my tinkering tends to be event-heavy, and even my smallest toy projects tend to start with creation of more layers than what's available in the free version), but this wasn't really an issue since the Personal License was simply a one-time investment, and I've been very happy with my purchase.
However, with the move to a subscription-based payment model, this changes completely. I can't justify paying $99 a year for how much I use the program. The Free Edition is also not an option because it seems to be even more restrictive than the C2 one. This is extremely unfortunate from a personal standpoint, and I'm clearly not alone with this opinion, seeing how much negative feedback the move to subscription model has garnered on the Construct forums.
But there is also the business standpoint to consider. The one-time payment was a huge pro for C2 and more than made up for the restrictions of the free edition in my books. But now with the move to a subscription model you're competing more directly with the likes of Unity that also uses a subscription model. And if you look at what Unity offers in the free tier[1] and compare it to Construct[2], the latter looks like a complete joke in comparison. With Unity, you get a full-featured engine with all the export options that you can make money with (with a revenue cap after which you need to upgrade, similar to C2 Personal -> Business), with the most notable "downside" basically being a "Made with Unity" splash screen. Something like this is what I would expect to see with the C3 Free Edition as well in order for it to be truly competitive. After all, game IDEs don't exist in a vacuum.
I think in comparison to our direct competitors in our space, our pricing is still competitive.
Well, you should, because both C3 and Unity using a subscription model vs the one-time payments of many other options makes it the most direct comparison. Both concretely and psychologically a subscription model requires a much more serious commitment to the product compared to a one-time payment.
And beyond the payment model, I've long thought that Construct offers a serious alternative to Unity for serious development purposes if you're making 2D games, and in fact I'd say in many ways Construct has the edge over Unity in this space since it's built for 2D development from ground-up whereas Unity is a 3D engine first, which makes 2D development in it more cumbersome. This is why I was happy to see you mention in another comment that you intend to shift the marketing of C3 to a more "serious" direction, where C2 often gave the impression of a "toy". But that's just another reason why you should consider yourself as a serious alternative to Unity yourself.
I assume that the "direct competitors" you're talking of are along the lines of Clickteam Fusion and Game Maker. It's certainly true that these are both 2D-focused game IDEs, but both are sold as one-time payments, much like C2. As someone who moved from Multimedia Fusion 2 to Construct 1 back in the day, I personally think C2 has already been the king of this space for years, wiping the floor with the competition when it comes to both usability and performance as well as scaling to big projects. This is why I'm not at all fundamentally opposed to "going bigger" with a subscription model to compete against other subscription model game IDEs, because I believe C3 is very much capable of competing in this space, all the while having a lower barrier to entry. But again, to be competitive here, things should really change with the way the free edition is handled.
Ultimately right now Construct 3 falls into a very uncomfortable position where I would never want to downgrade to the likes of Clickteam Fusion (neither the current 2.5 nor the upcoming 3) or Game Maker Studio 2 (because they are both less powerful/performant as well as less usable on the whole and scale big way worse), but I honestly wouldn't want to use Unity either because while power-wise it's definitely capable I'd still be somewhat of a downgrade in terms of usability for 2D development (I have actually used Unity for a couple projects in the past, but I've stuck around with Construct 2 for this exact reason). As a professional programmer there isn't really any insurmountable obstacles to using any of these programs for me, so it's all about the convenience for me, and 2D development with Construct is where I believe the sweet spot lies in this regard. But as it is, C3 free edition is just too restricted power-wise and the subscription is too big of an investment. Because of this I also see myself having a hard time recommending C3 to other people in the future, where recommending C2 used to be a no-brainer.
Similar payment models doesn't mean you're competing. Granted there will be some overlap, but generally we feel our customer bases are fairly well defined and separate.
> I assume that the "direct competitors" you're talking of are along the lines of Clickteam Fusion and Game Maker. It's certainly true that these are both 2D-focused game IDEs, but both are sold as one-time payments, much like C2. As someone who moved from Multimedia Fusion 2 to Construct 1 back in the day, I personally think C2 has already been the king of this space for years, wiping the floor with the competition when it comes to both usability and performance as well as scaling to big projects.
Thank you for the kind comments, and I'm glad you consider Construct to be wiping the floor! Shows we're doing something right ;)
We did not observe as many free edition conversions to paid as we would of hoped with C2. For this reason, we're experimenting with locking it down more than C2. We will see how this goes. Our philosophy has always been "give more" not "take away", so we're starting conservatively.
And, as you put it, we are wiping the floor with the competition so we feel reasonably comfortable at this stage experimenting with a different pricing model.
Worth mentioning is that we're planning on selling C3 for ~$99 USD per year, if you want all the Gamemaker export options you'll spend > $1,000. I feel in comparison to that, our pricing is still competitive.
It inevitably invites comparison though.
>We did not observe as many free edition conversions to paid as we would of hoped with C2.
I can understand that, and I wouldn't mind it at all if C3 was also a one-time purchase like C2 (if that was still the case I'd be buying C3 in a heartbeat), but I definitely think it's the wrong way forward with the change in the payment model. I have a bunch of small C2 projects from over the years I've used the program, and I can go back and edit them with C2 even today. However, if I got a C3 subscription for a year and upgraded my projects to C3, then a year later when my subscription ran out my projects would suddenly become essentially read-only due to the free edition limitations, and this whole thing of effectively locking me off from my own projects just completely kills my interest in the current free/paid model of C3. (I'm not actually sure how Unity handles this same scenario, but seeing how the free version still offers the fully-featured engine and how the tiers differ, I'd expect the story to be much better there.)
>Worth mentioning is that we're planning on selling C3 for ~$99 USD per year, if you want all the Gamemaker export options you'll spend > $1,000. I feel in comparison to that, our pricing is still competitive.
While that's true for Game Maker Studio 2, you also have to consider that both Clickteam Fusion and Game Maker Studio 1 have shown up in several Humble Bundles for practically pennies at this point. I actually own both CF2.5 and GM:S along with the most important exporters available for them (Desktop/iOS/Android/HTML5) and I only paid $15 for each (and I bought both because I wanted to see how they stack up against C2 today, which cost more than both combined). From usability and performance standpoints I don't see GMS2 being that big of an upgrade, so sticking with GMS1 would certainly be a viable option for anyone interested in it as an alternative.
>And, as you put it, we are wiping the floor with the competition so we feel reasonably comfortable at this stage experimenting with a different pricing model.
Well, sadly as much as I like Construct as a 2D game IDE, it pretty much kills the program for me and also makes it way harder to recommend to other people as well, which is something I've done a lot with C2 over the years (I got a lot of people at my uni to use it and know several people who ended up buying personal licenses as well).
Personally I think you could expand the free version and make the paid version more expensive. If I ever get around to doing commercial products with Construct, I certainly wouldn't mind paying more than $99 a year for a paid version, even if it was just to get rid of splash screens. You could also take cues from how Unity differentiates the tiers in other regards, like with the cloud build queue priorities and multiplayer support etc (if you're using Scirra-provided infrastructure).
Scratch requires a lot more up-front knowledge to make a simple game, e.g. students need to learn control flow, event loops, etc.
Construct, being event-based (and especially with the built-in behaviors) lets us get beginners started in about 40 minutes, while still being complex enough that they understand variables, instances, properties, etc within a few hours.
Virtual DOM is completely unnecessary to us. We have minimal problems with DOM calls. It is all to do with layout performance, and VDOM makes no difference at all there.
It looks like your browser will not be able to run Construct 3.
Most people will not be willing to change their browsing habits to use your web application. The onus is on us, as software developers, to ensure our code runs in the user's browser, not the other way around.
Ultimately it's up to you to decide where the line is drawn; nobody supports IE7 anymore because it's hardly used. But I suspect you'll lose a tremendous amount of potential users by not supporting Firefox, Safari or recent Chrome.
I'm sure you guys are aware of preprocessors; is there a reason you haven't used them to implement things like HTML imports or CSS variables?
I assume the exported games are portable and can run in older browsers. So the users shouldn't have to worry.
What features are currently missing from Firefox to be allowed to use Construct 3? Seeing more and more errors like this lately, and most of the times the features the developers don't think Firefox supports, actually exists.
Edit: Running Firefox 52, I get a list of features that are not supported yet that is needed, so seems legit.
If you want to try Construct 3 anyways on Firefox, you can enable dom.webcomponents.enabled and dom.dialog_element.enabled while running Firefox 53 in about:config, and everything should work fine. Firefox 53 is supposed to be released 2017-04-18.
Thanks to the team behind Construct to actually use feature detection instead of user agent sniffing to block browsers.
Firefox is close, but is missing HTML imports and Dialog element. If you open: https://editor.construct.net/
It will list the missing features.
I could understand if you said you need WebGL or WebAudio or some other hardware/OS interface. You don't need HTML imports.
Look, I understand how one might like HTML imports. Once you've gone down the rabbit hole of Web technology, all the fancy experimental features make it look like HTML/CSS are now adequate. They're not. It's a trap.
The real answer is writing Javascript (or something that compiles to Javascript). Always has been, always will be. Don't trust the web consortium to specify things that maybe browser vendors will implement. Do it yourself now, thank yourself later.
I'm not a fan of apps in browsers, but on a Mac it beats having to start VMWare and Windows by far!
For me, the hugest win over 2 is the ability to run it on the mobile device in parallel and have almost instant testing. Maybe you could add a feature like generating a preview-url at some point?
On my Android it didn't work with the latest updated Chrome, but it works fine with Chrome Canary or Beta, which can be downloaded from the Play-Store.
Also great to be able to pay monthly, even if it's a bit more.
So, 1000x thanks for making Construct!
For what it's worth though. I went to the homepage and it does seem like a really nice product that a lot of effort was put into. When I saw game maker I didn't expect to be as impressed but it seems far better than the other web based game makers I've seen.
Although it requires the absolute latest Chrome (I was half a version back) which is interesting. I wonder what is in Chrome 57 that is required and not in Chrome 56.
Sorry about the 404, shouldn't happen to everyone but we're working on it...
Even if I prefer native to web, I have to concede you guys did a wonderful piece of work and I had quite some fun playing around with it.
Good luck with the project.
I can think of many drawbacks. Where's the benefit?
Secondly, a huge feature that we're yet to show is multi language ability. This is an insanely difficult thing to implement in a C++ program, but reasonably trivial in HTML.
In the browser lets us reach everyone in the world, whilst only maintaining one code base and let's us develop and iterate faster than ever before.
But that's not even the point of my question. What I actually meant is: Where is the benefit for the user? I wouldn't want to use applications in-browser, unless there's some real value in that. For everything else, I strongly prefer a "native" application.
Another thing, it enables us to rapidly iterate and deploy through one code base. Maintaining code bases for multiple platforms will be like a ball and chain on our feet. End user will get a better product.
Apps wrapped in a browser are blatantly clunky and feel out of place from the OS compared to something using native controls, not to mention consuming more resources and battery. [0]
What specific parts of Construct 3 do you feel are clunky?
Menus, panels, windows, controls, fonts, fullscreen support, accessibility..too many to list, and WHY do I get the ugly red X button on the right corner when I'm on a Mac?? Why do you force me to use Windows UI paradigms, after making such a big deal about web apps = yay portability?
The reality remains that for now and the foreseeable future: Users do NOT, CAN not, get the best possible experience unless you're willing to write and maintain native apps.
Well, you're kinda making a point for me there. Why would a game developer use a Chromebook or an Android device?
The second point applies more or less to an Electron app, too.
Because they are usually a lot cheaper and more accessible worldwide.
As an example, a market we've identified is educational in US, there's millions of Chromebooks out there gathering dust. If you are an educational user, this could open a lot of doors.
> The second point applies more or less to an Electron app, too.
Yes, we are planning on distributing desktop builds via Electron. First phase is in browser only as there's a little bit more to prepare before we can release downloadable builds. Is that what you mean?
Tom has mentioned other points, but one major value I see of Construct3 is that when I'm away from my desk or laptop I now have the ability to tinker.
The amount of times I've had to take notes or do a sketch in lieu of being able to sit down and tinker due to physical constraints.
Now I can jump straight in and prototype whilst mobile on my mobile.
True mobile warrior ;)
[0]: https://twitter.com/richard_boegli/status/846737923793936385
EDIT: don't leave a comma right after the URL, add a space :-)
And yes, we're going to be releasing an Electron version at some point soon!
And people who make games can distribute them in Electron as well.
For most users, it will be $99 USD p/y. Businesses/educational institutes will have different pricing.
Edit: Now fixed