HTML5 based drag and drop game creator
scirra.com
scirra.com
Make a video where you make a cool but simple game, like an asteroid shooter, or pong. Keep the video short, and well scripted in advance. Keep the video to 10 mins or less, have all your graphics already in place, and show non-developers really how easy this will be for them.
I had always wished at the time that I could somehow send these games to others. Now with the internet and web based software, it might be a dream come true for my younger self :)
The successor to TGF/CNC (Multimedia Fusion) has add-ons for exporting to Flash, iOS and soon Android. It can still import old GAM/CCA files, too, if you're looking for a nostalgia fix!
I think Clickteam have been forgotten about to a degree, mainly due to the website/marketing not being much different than it was in the 90s, but things are beginning to change in that regard.
Great products, by the way.
Of course, there were always people with websites where you could download games (hope you had a 56k modem!). And I know I certainly sent a few floppy discs around. So even back then, you weren't limited.
Disclosure: also a Clickteam programmer.
I've also really started noticing that audiences for games made in these sorts of programs really are opening up, I spoke to an older man the other day who just bought an iPad, he was telling me how much him and his friends were laughing for hours playing fun little games, he said he hasn't had that much fun for a long time!
There really is a revival of these types of games going on at the moment in my opinion, all fuelled by new technology making it a lot more widely accessible.
The experience in their demo games is awful at present, but most of the problems seemed to be stuff rooted in the low quality of current browser implementations (bad audio functionality cross-browser, etc).
Two more concrete nits, though: The camera in the ghost shooter demo borders on unplayable, and both demos suffer from long, frequent garbage collection pauses. Even years from now, I doubt that GC pauses will be gone, so if your goal is to ship good games using HTML5, you need to take steps to control the rate at which you create garbage.
I'm also uncertain whether IE has a generational collector or the ability to collect individual pages separately. My current testing suggests that it might have a generational collector in 10, but it likely does not in 9 - short-lived temporaries cause awful pauses just like FF.
Even in Chrome (generational + process isolation), too many short-lived temporaries will cause you to spend a ton of CPU time in their collector running gen1 collections. This stuff adds up, even more than it does in say .NET or Java.
On mobile platforms in particular, even a generational collector with isolated processes (like Chrome) is not going to perform great because your CPU is so much slower and memory bandwidth is not as plentiful as on PC, and your processor might not be out-of-order. Likewise, the state of the art for mobile browser technology is far behind the desktop - Android's stock browser is a pale shadow of Chrome, and mobile Safari is not as solid as desktop Safari. MS is only just now rolling out something roughly on par with IE9 for Windows Phone users - WP7 shipped with a browser that was far behind the curve. Firefox Mobile's JS runtime is not any more sophisticated than Firefox Desktop's (though, oddly enough, Firefox Mobile runs each tab in its own process, so you get some benefit there).
You should try to at least minimize the number of short lived temporary objects, especially if the total set of live objects is large. If you have a ton of long-lived objects and a complex graph, the GC is going to take time to do a full pass over the JS heap and that's going to make your pauses long enough to be noticeable. It'll be even worse if some of your long-lived objects have gotten paged out due to not being used recently - collections might have to bring those pages in from disk and will cause a horrible stall.
In some cases, a pool/freelist for your short-lived objects might be enough to eliminate pauses and remove the burden on the GC. In other cases, manual lifetime management will be too difficult/error prone and you should instead work to minimize the burden on the GC from your temporaries (by reducing their count or complexity in terms of the work the GC has to do to mark them).
P.S. If you or anyone else at Scirra wants to talk more about this stuff, feel free to contact me.
Also it looks like the sound disapears after some time in all browsers (was tested in Space Blaster Game)
Space Blaster Game http://www.scirra.com/demos/space-blaster/index.html
Ghost Shooter http://www.scirra.com/demos/ghost-shooter/index.html
Works awesome in Chrome 13.0.x
Impressive!
Meanwhile I've been building a GPLed Squeak/Scratch inspired game making app, as an extension to Common Lisp. The language extension is called Blocky, and the site is http://blocky.io
What do people think of the visual language aspect of some of these tools (such as Stencyl and Werkkzeug?) Is anyone interested in exploring the Common Lisp side of this scene?
There's also Scheme work going on with Scheme Bricks and Fluxus which I blogged about a while back. http://blocky.io/blog/2011/07/07/go-check-out-schemebricks/
Agree with DevX101 about the need for a video showing the programming process - I also looked for one.
Think of it this way, we have Construct 2 and we are selling licenses for it. Because Construct 2 is in Beta we are rewarding people who buy it now as early adopters by giving them a significant discount. Once you buy a license you have a fully licensed copy of Construct 2.
Any new builds of Construct 2 are compatible with your license. You would only need to pay when we release Construct 3 which is far, far off in the future :) We release new builds all the time.
Hope that makes sense!
Tom