
HTML5 based drag and drop game creator - e1ven
http://www.scirra.com/
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DevX101
You guys NEED to get a video demoing how easy it is to make a game. Your real
market isn't existing game developers. It's people who love games, and would
be interested in making games, but don't quite have the chops to do it yet.
Most of those people will already assume they can't make games, and not even
go through the download process to see whether or not your claims are true.
You have to convince them it really is that easy to make a game. So show them.

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.

~~~
TomGullen
I do the website (my brother writes the editor), this is a great idea. Neither
of us know much about making videos it will be another steep learning curve
but I'll try and get them made and maybe even do some A/B testing with them.
Your reasons make perfect sense - thanks for your comment!

~~~
gallamine
Tom, this reminds me a lot of the game creators that Clickteam created years
ago - Klick&Play, The Games Factory and Click and Create. Do you take any
inspiration from these? I spent _hundreds_ of hours as a kid making games. I
consider it one of formative aspects of my life. Keep up the project. I think
it could be really successful.

~~~
windsurfer
I _loved_ the games factory and click and create! I made so many games... and
it really was so easy. That software might have determined my life's
direction.

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 :)

~~~
udp
Hey, I actually work for Clickteam today.

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.

~~~
windsurfer
I'm amazed you're still around! I actually used Multimedia Fusion too. Legal
purchase and everything. At the time I couldn't find any kind of export like
that. I also didn't have an internet connection, so maybe it just wasn't up to
date.

Great products, by the way.

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kevingadd
Awesome to see the Construct guys moving so quickly to embrace HTML5.

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.

~~~
AshleysBrain
Hey, I'm the runtime dev. Interested in your comment about GC pauses. Off the
top of my head, the runtime either makes short-lived temporary objects or
long-lived ones, which AFAIK is what collectors are best at. Any tips on how
we can improve it?

~~~
kevingadd
Short-lived temporary objects are going to perform awful in Firefox until the
addition of a generational GC, and will still perform somewhat badly until it
goes multi-process (sometime in the distant future). In particular, since
right now JS all runs on the UI thread, a user with lots of tabs open is going
to have really long, painful pauses while playing a Construct game in the
browser.

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.

~~~
AshleysBrain
Thanks for the tips, I've sent you an email since I think there's more to
cover!

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Egregore
It's an interesting project, but it needs some polish: unfortunately it
doesn't work well on all modern browsers, for example the image in Chrome for
demo game Ghost Shooter was broken (it worked well in Firefox and Opera)

Also it looks like the sound disapears after some time in all browsers (was
tested in Space Blaster Game)

~~~
musket
also fps on chrome was really bad. Didn't try ff but on ie its was better.

~~~
TomGullen
Musket, have you tried enabling Chrome hardware acceleration in the settings?
[http://technicallyeasy.net/2011/03/how-to-enable-graphics-
ha...](http://technicallyeasy.net/2011/03/how-to-enable-graphics-hardware-
acceleration-google-chrome/) By default this is disabled, eventually browsers
will ship with this enabled by default. It should allow a much better FPS.

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bo_Olean
Games made with Construct 2 From the Demo page:

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!

~~~
TomGullen
Thanks :D

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davidotoole
I think the Squeak Etoys and MIT Scratch movement have been going mainstream,
judging from the appearance of blocks-style drag-and-drop programming
environments in these very democratizing game-making tools.

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/>

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usedtolurk
Both demos worked beautifully for me in Firefox. Very impressed guys - well
done!

Agree with DevX101 about the need for a video showing the programming process
- I also looked for one.

~~~
TomGullen
Thank you! We appreciate your feedback. We do want to get some videos up as
well as more demos soon :)

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leej
I have a question. Does early adopter license cover future major/minor
releases?

~~~
TomGullen
Hi Leej, the early adopter is considered full payment for Construct 2. There
are many more releases to come! We like to release often with small increments
rather than big monthly ones. See <http://www.scirra.com/construct2/releases>
for our release history.

~~~
leej
Thanks for the response. Sorry but I'm confused. So future major/minor
releases are free to upgrade for license owners?

~~~
TomGullen
Hi Leej,

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

