Show HN: Construct Animate – our new browser-based animation tool
construct.net
construct.net
I've never used any animation tools, and it's been on my list to make a few basic logo animations in css/js. It's striking how many features you guys have managed to ship in a webapp and I'll definitely play with Construct Animate in the near future.
Also want to say that the tutorial/walkthrough is excellent, and gave me a great impression of the core functionality in under a minute. Without the walkthrough, I might spend the same ~30 seconds being unenthused about the UI elements, which others have pointed out have a distinct mid-2000s appearance that I personally don't care for.
Good job :)
Site resources looks to be coping just fine which is great (we often get upwards of 20 pageviews per second on our site at peak times) so will put this down as a blip.
Look forward to hearing more about how you get on with Animate, Ashley and Diego have done a stellar job in getting productivity software running in the browser!
I still remember the demo flash animation to this day.
I wish more web products enabled a one kid show to get something done that wows adults.
Web dev today is a messy onion of poor abstractions that you need to know too much to get a little done.
Also, i just went to create a new project: 2 things immediately were a problem 1. the modal didn't have differentiation between primary button color and secondary. I clicked cancel 2. after clicking create it took >30+ seconds and there was no indication that something was happening.
I look forward to checking it out more!
On topic: remarkably the Construct Animate editor/demo works even without cookies/web storage enabled. Nice :)
I'm reminded of a desktop app Google has called "Google Web Designer" which can do similar timeline based animations and exports to the same formats. But it's nice being able to do in the browser without downloading an app. However, Web Designer is free so there's that. Also, who knows how long Google will continue to support this app.
Not sure why that error happened when exporting a GIF - I just tried it and it's working here (Chrome/Windows). Could you copy and paste the error message and send it to me at ashley@construct.net? I'll see if I can figure it out from that.
If I wanted to use one of those animations as overlay on a video I have (with transparency), what export would you recommend? Based on your intro video, is seems it would be a series of PNG, or is there some other option?
[1] https://www.construct.net/en/tutorials/exporting-image-seque...
[2] https://www.construct.net/en/tutorials/exporting-videos-tran...
Then they changed it to browser based, subscription only, Chrome only. The whole thing becomes read-only the moment your credit card stops drip-feeding the subscription.
When you poke around in these tools on the weekend, the subscription model falls flat. Being billed for "time" that happens to fall between my use of these products, is a bizarre way to charge customers for software. I get that if I rented a lawnmower, I'm paying for every day I have that mower because other customers want that same mower.
Construct 2 was pay once, but we found after a few years sales really plateaued. Going to SaaS was a difficult transition for us, but it's worked out well and we now see year on year growth which gives us a lot more breathing room.
I think it's important to also recognise that pay once software just doesn't work as a model for a lot of countries around the world. As an example, for Construct 3 we charge the equivalent of ~$12 USD per year in Malawi which makes it a very affordable option, whereas a one-off price would have to be roughly quadruple that for it to be economical for us, and would likely put it out of reach of a lot of people who otherwise may of paid annually for it.
SaaS puts more onus on us to cater for our current paying customers, before with pay once our focus was weighted on acquiring new customers. To what extent this actually plays out is kind of tricky to put your finger on especially from where I'm sitting but there is certainly an element of this in our work.
I'm not going to pretend that SaaS is suitable for everyone and every product and I understand why people are adverse, but for us it's worked well and a lot of noisy predictions from some of our customer base about this being our downfall never played out. The transition to pay once to SaaS was a vulnerable time for our business and a very interesting one at that.
Pay once still works. You could have increased the price to $500 or something. It would then take 3+ years of subscription pricing to equal one pay-once amount. Many users would opt for subscription anyway in that case.
> noisy predictions from some of our customer base
When customers make noises about the pricing, you have the choice to stand your ground and fight the war on pricing. Or you could meet them half way. But you stuck to your guns, and so did I when I jumped ship back when the newly released Construct 3 was indeed Chrome only at the time. I never made noises on the forums about it because I was fairly new to Construct 2. I just left quietly.
It could also reflect badly on us if customers on older versions are demoing the product to other potential users when they are many release cycles behind the latest version. There's a myriad of benefits of just having all customers on the same version. To go down the maintenance plan route for us would be a mistake.
Generally propositions from customers for different or more exotic pricing methods over what we've gone with tend to involve a lot more complexity to ultimately allow people to buy it for less. The model we've got is working well, and we don't see any advantage to changing it right now.
> I never made noises on the forums about it because I was fairly new to Construct 2. I just left quietly.
Which is fine, but we're a much more successful company than we ever were with Construct 2, largely because of the direction we went with pricing. We accept it's not for everyone. I think looking back over our history we've gone from Open Source to Pay Once to SaaS. When you go through these changes you're going to lose customers who were attracted to your original payment model, this is just a reality we have to accept.
That was one of the most frustrating things about using construct 2. The archetype was effectively arbitrarily designated as the "first instance of that object on the first layout of the project", so if you spawned new instances they would be preassigned those settings. It was very non-obvious and led to people having to build helper functions that would spawn new instances with the desired default settings.
[edit] Sorry, was the UI for the Construct actually built using Construct? Do you guys use PixiJS or anything like that as an underlying engine?
The UI was separately developed with JavaScript, it wasn't made in Construct itself (which is mostly canvas-based). The whole runtime is also in-house - we don't use PixiJS or any other libraries, once again it's all our own in-house engine, custom WebGL/WebGPU renderer, etc.
As others have mentioned, the workflow looks a lot like the old days of Flash, which I really miss. I’ll definitely be giving this a try for future projects.
It took a while to figure it out as you can create a SVG object but can't import a file and there's nothing matching "import" in the docs.
What a weird decision. Testing the software whether it would correctly work with my assets is probably the most important purpose of the trial version.
edit: I've been corrected below
1 - https://www.construct.net/en/animation-software/manual/proje...