There are three versions of the software. The free edition places limits on the number of resources that can be used within a game and restricts access to certain features. The Standard ($65) and Business ($255) packages remove most of these restrictions.

Early adopter licences give purchasers a 50% discount off the normal prices which are quoted above.

At its full price the Business version of Construct 2 is more expensive that YoYo Games’ GameMaker HTML5 ($199), however the Business version only needs to be purchased by businesses or individuals that have taken over $5,000 in revenue from their games.

Construct 2 Licence Prices Revealed: Free – $255 is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Since then there have been a lot of developments as both YoYo Games and Scirra have turned their attention away from PC-runnable executable files towards new platforms. Whilst YoYo Games plan to release the HTML5 version of GameMaker and Game Maker Studio the original Construct software has been superseded with a new project, Construct 2, which exports games in HTML5.

Last night I caught up with Ashley and Thomas Gullen from Scirra to find out what they’ve been up to and how they see Construct 2 fitting into the HTML5 game creation software market.

Construct Classic
The original Construct, now renamed Construct Classic, has now been downloaded over 330,000 times since its first release in 2007.   Development of the drag and drop game builder which creates executable games has now been stopped by Scirra itself.

“We’ve basically handed Construct Classic over to the community who are really enthusiastic and keen to keep it developed” explained Thomas Gullen, ”It’s Open Source so anyone can join in.  It still has,and for a long time will have a lot more function and use for a lot of people.  At the moment we estimate there are around 1,000 regular users per day.”

“The problem with Construct Classic although it was a very useful and popular program is the design is fairly rigid”.  ”It’s basically not possible to add another exporter to Classic – we wanted to do so ourselves” added lead developer Ashley.  ”One of the reasons we restarted Construct 2 was because Classic isn’t written in a way that allows it to be extended like that.”
Construct 2
Construct 2 is the closed-source HTML5 game creation tool where Scirra now dedicate their resources.

“When Construct 2 first launched in February it was very bare and thin on features, but it’s got a lot more now and we have a new sort of community site to engage users with.  The public beta exports to HTML5 right now and  we’re developing it as quickly as possible.   We’ll have animations support in Construct 2 shortly, and Firefox 5 and Internet Explorer 9 are running some of the demos very nicely so I think we’re building something that will intruige a lot of current Game Maker users.”

Pricing has not yet been worked out but “there will be a free edition, a basic indie license, and some kind of pro – still working on that.  It’ll be cheaper than GM Studio, although GM Studio will initially export to more platforms, but HTML5 is the most important one anyway!  It should be noted that the free edition is not planned to be incredibly restrictive as some users fear, we plan on making it very functional and useful to users.  In the long term, Construct 2 has a modular exporters system so we can bolt on extra exporters in future too.”

Exporting a game from Construct 2 results in a folder contain a HTML file along with some JavaScript files and PNG images.  These files can be uploaded to any web server.  In addition Construct will also eventually offer on-site hosting ”we have plans for in the future having an HTML5 online arcade, which users can upload their creations to for free.”

“We aren’t really defining a ’1.0′ release, we’re just incrementing a number… release 42, 43, 44 etc.  Some users have already made the odd game or two – but it’s easy to hit unfinished features right now.   I reckon by the end of the year we’ll have something that is practically useful and competitive.”
Performance
A simple demo game created using Construct 2 is available to play online, currently it only runs well within Firefox 5 and Internet Explorer 9 as these browsers have good hardware acceleration.

“All browsers are heading towards hardware acceleration, within a year I’m sure that kind of game will be commonplace. Surprisingly IE9 seems to have the best performance over any other browser at the moment.  One test we had I ran on my computer in IE9, the performance of HTML5 was directly comparable to the same EXE game made in Construct Classic.  HTML5 is still quite a young technology so it will take a little while for browsers to catch up to it, and I’m sure they will.”

“iOS is pretty bad with HTML5 right now, but I think iOS 5 changes that.  Right now it is early days for HTML5, even chrome is a bit behind on canvas performance – but there’s no reason iOS can’t run it well, they just haven’t optimised their canvas yet just need to wait it out really.  Mobile phones have a bit of catching up to do, when I was developing some Javascript on the iPhone it was really slow, but phones seem to be exponentially increasing in capability so I don’t think it will be too long until they are up to speed.”
Communities
“One thing that’s probably quite obvious is that communities attached to particular brands are extremely loyal.  This is a negative and a positive depending who you are, for us you might say we are at a disadvantage because of this facing the mountain of competitor’s users, which is why if we want to get anywhere we have to offer something free and miles better to entice them to try other things.

“Me and Ash talked about support a lot about support, it’s something we will focus on heavily when the time comes.  One thing I LOVE on a website is when you get answers to support tickets on the same day, or even hour!  It’s just amazing and is of so much value to the users, that’s what we want to aim for.  Writing good tutorials and having a comprehensive manual is important too.”

“We’re quite excited about the opportunities of the new site, really trying to make it as community driven as possible, it works so well on Stack Overflow, that’s the sort of learning environment we want to have at some point.”
Scirra
At the moment Scirra comprises of Ashley and Thomas Gullen together with David Clarke who was heavily involved in Construct Classic.  Ashley is the “main engine” behind Scirra whilst Tom is involved with the website side of the project.

“At the moment Ashley is pretty much working full time on this as he has just finished University.  Hopefully in the future when more time is filled up I can start contributing more to Construct itself and plugin development” said Thomas. “We are extremely fortunate in that both our skills and qualifications seem to compliment each other perfectly for Scirra.”

Scirra’s income model is based solely on Construct 2 licence sales.  ”We actually thought long and hard about all the ways we could monetise and went through a lot of models.  We at some point soon will be offering discount early adopter licenses.  We really want Scirra to have a sustainable financial future, freemium - tried and tested, GameMaker and GameSalad do it.”

“If you ask users what the licensing model should be, it shouldn’t really be a surprise that they want everything, and they want it free.  I think a lot of people wont even consider a 30 day trial these days, too much good stuff is free – Google, browsers, open source stuff…, so there has to be an always-on free edition.”

“It’s a bit of a sad state of affairs right now” said Ashely, “I’m overdrawn and on an ancient laptop, but I’m still going fulltime in anticipation license sales or some such will bail us out soon!  Nobody said startups were easy, anyway!”
Competitors
“A lot of companies seem to have similar philosophies about where the games industry is heading, we have a very strong belief it is going towards HTML5 and we are in just before it starts picking up a lot of momentum.   It looks like there’ll be a Construct 2 vs. GameMaker vs. Gamesalad battle in HTML5 soon (if not now).  Our approach is to give the user control – they’re not tied to our arcade or any particular website, and they can upload to any site.”

“GameSalad seem to be leading the way in their marketing and execution.  They have branding and PR power we can only dream of.”  They have the funding too!

“We don’t see them as a direct competitor though because they seem to have found their niche and are exploiting it really well – Mac users.  We don’t have much interest this early on to extend into that domain, and likewise I’m not sure if they would need to/want to/be able to extend into the Windows domain either.”

“GameMaker really is leading the way, they [YoYo Games] appear to be in a really strong position, but hopefully our product and our other efforts will really start to show and we can create a much more competitive environment.”

Having seen the new YoYo Games website Thomas said “I think it’s always difficult doing a new website, it’s a really delicate balance and it’s impossible to make everyone happy if you have more than 10 visitors!”  Scirra also recently redesigned their website.
Future
“We’re still a laptops-in-bedrooms startup, but hopefully we can soon upgrade ourselves to an office once we get some licenses on sale, and also upgrade ourselves from ‘ignorable’ to ‘something else out there’.”

“We’re of the opinion browser support in 1-2 years will be excellent – and it will essentially kill flash (at least for what it’s famous for – banner ads, games and gadgets – HTML5 does that better).  Flash has an absolutely huge footprint, so it’s going to take ages for that beast to die but the slew of new tools for html5 could speed that up.”

“Classic is a great point to launch from too, the old software brings in visitors so if the big guys are ignoring us, I don’t actually mind.  We can work on our stuff and make a splash later on.”

“It would be nice to one day have Construct 2 as the de facto HTML5 game/app editor, that’s the dream.”

Construct 2: Interview with creators of HTML5 Game Creation Tool is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Community Links is taken from: GameMaker Blog

GameSalad currently have 20 employees are recruiting for another 9 positions.

GameSalad Raises $6.1M (Partly from Disney) is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Out will go Construct 0.99.96, which exports games to the .exe format, and in will come Construct 2 which will have HTML5 as its main export format. Exporting to HTML5 means that games made using Construct 2 will be playable across a wide variety of devices including iPhones and iPads, Android phones and tablets and computers running Windows, Linux or Mac.

While HTML5 support is not currently as standard for users of old devices the repositioning of Construct leaves it in a good place to take advantage of upcoming future growth in demand for HTML5 application creation.

Development of Construct 1 has now stopped aside for a few promised bug fixes and the two versions will not be compatible with each other.

An public preview of Construct 2 is now available to try but as it is so early in the development cycle its functionality is very much limited. A very basic example of a HTML5 game created using the engine can be found here (playable only if you are using a decent browser).

Unlike Construct 0.x which has been a free download Construct 2 will follow a pay-what-you-want distribution model similar to that we have seen in several Indie game sales.

Construct 2 will also contain built in support for third party exporters which community members will be able to write using a Exporter Development Kit to support the playing of games on new platforms.

A list of new features can be found here.

See also: 5 areas where Construct beats Game Maker

Construct 2 Exports to HTML5 and more is taken from: GameMaker Blog

GameSalad, an iOS only development tool, has been around since 2008 and over 700 created games are currently available in the App Store.  They very recently announced that they would be moving from from a pay-up-front model to “GameSalad Direct” which eliminates tiered annual membership fees (previously at $99 and $1,999) and make available for everyone features previously only present in the more expensive version.

Essentially Direct distribution will see GameSalad publish games through a central account on behalf of their creators to the App Store in a revenue share deal.  One difference from the YoYo Games model is that developers will also be charged an up-front fee for GameSalad to publish each piece of software.

Existing GameSalad developers don’t seem too pleased at the changes being introduced as it appears that to be able to update existing Apps created with the development tool you will be required to transfer over to the new revenue-sharing licence agreement when your current deal expires.

Full details, including the revenue share proportion, have yet to be announced and the GameSalad team have pretty much kept their members in the dark since the initial post with few of the questions asked by developers being answered.

GameSalad say they are “currently exploring options” to address user concerns.

The Unity development tool does not have a central publishing option. An easy iOS development tool to watch in the future is RocketPack for which costings have not yet been announced.

YoYo Games set to go head to head with GameSalad is taken from: GameMaker Blog

DS Game Maker 5 IDE (click to enlarge)

The screenshot above is of the DS Game Maker 5 game editor a beta of which has just been released [10MB]. The similarity to that of Game Maker will no doubt enrage some YoYo Games forum members (see previously).

The DSGM manual has a short section discussing the relationship, or lack of, with YoYo Games’ Game Maker.

“Many people compare DS Game Maker to Game Maker by Mark Overmars. In reality they are different products by different people (one is a university professor; one is a 16 year old). DS development is different from computer development so comparing the programs is difficult on that score. For a start the Nintendo DS has considerably less temporary memory (RAM) than a computer, these days around 256 times less.

The only real similarity is the events and actions concept. This is an excellent concept, but it is also such a simple concept that could not possibly be copyrighted. It has already been duplicated for the Nintendo Wii with Wii Game Studio (though not as well as the DS implementation). The programs share interface layouts in areas, such as for Objects. This is merely coincidental, that the layout used in Game Maker is the best way to lay it out, and that the best way to do it has been chosen in DS Game Maker, and that it is somewhat similar.

Very simple concepts like having a menu bar and toolbar at the top of the main window like Game Maker, and having “floating windows” is certainly not copying it, such features have been part of Windows programs since Game Maker was even created.

Finally, I admit that DS Game Maker V5 has moved very close to the program by YoYo Games /Mark Overmars, but it is still definitely a unique implementation that builds upon the good points of Game Maker and the great events/actions system, but does not harm their business…”

Although I think the new DSGM IDE is an improvement over its current offering I question whether Game Maker is the right program to take inspiration from.  Game Maker’s interface has remained very similar over the last 4 major releases and I am expecting to see some requests for improvements in the results of the GMIndie Game Maker survey which should be out tomorrow.

What are your favourite and least favourite areas of the Game Maker interface?  Two things which are annoy me are the way the scripts are placed within object Actions – why the need to drag and drop the code icon then double click to edit it instead of displaying the code directly under Actions? – and the minor but frustrating missing functionality of [F2] to rename resources (instead it is Ctrl+R).

[Show as slideshow]

This is not an advertisement!

DS Game Maker 5 IDE Interface Looks Familiar is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Scirra’s open-source game creation software Construct still receives regular updates and version 1 should be out very soon.  A brief comparison of Game Maker and Construct which I wrote last year remains one of the most popular articles on GMB.  Ashley Gullen from the Construct project recently revealed (in a Russian interview) that they have already decided to plan a complete rewrite for Construct 2 which will have some kind of commercial option and the ability to create games for use on other platforms.

Gendai Games who are behind the GameSalad iPhone Game Maker have recently secured $1M of funding and are currently recruiting.  A week after the launch of Apple’s iPad more than 10% of the 100 best selling games were developed using GameSalad.  The fact that tools such as GameSalad have been allowed to continue means that there remains a possibility of a future version of Game Maker offering the option to create games for a variety of iDevices.

Stencyl, labelled vapourware by many, is currently promoting the fact that the cross-platform tool can be used to create flash games.  I applied to the beta ages ago, heard nothing and now many months on there is still no public version.  To be honest I’ve lost all interest in the project though it will be good to see how it compares to Game Maker if a public release ever becomes available.

The Flashpunk ActionScript library has attracted a small following of members of the Game Maker community.  Development of the framework which is intended to be used to design 2-dimensional flash games has been ongoing with the latest change made yesterday.

James Garner (interview) from DSGameMaker has a cross-platform easy game creation utility lined up to be his next project after version 5 of DSGM is released.

It will be interesting to see whether these new game development tools take people away from Game Maker or instead draw a new crowd of people to “easy” game development.

Round-up of other Game Development Tools news is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Construct is a free open-source DirectX game creator with a drag-and-drop interface.  

Last weekend I spoke with one of the people behind the project, Ashley Gullen, who asked me why I thought Stencyl [official website] was so much more well known than the Construct project which has got considerably further along its development.  Unlike Stencyl who consistently refuse to give details of their release schedule Construct is available for public download now.

Clearly I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity to take a look at Construct (current release 0.98.3), and I liked what I saw.  Construct, which has support for integrated Python scripting, has a PowerPoint style layout and several advantages over Game Maker.

5 Reasons why Construct is better than Game Maker is taken from: GameMaker Blog