7 ms·

HTML5 based drag and drop game creator

68 points by e1ven 15y ago

Egregore 15y ago
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)
- TomGullen 15y ago
  Sound implementation is extremely buggy and poor in all browsers, hopefully browser vendors will work to resolve this soon. It's really hard for developers to work with at the moment.
  - Egregore 15y ago
    I've seen some html5 frameworks implement sound through flash (as a temporary step backward)
    - TomGullen 15y ago
      As useful as this would be in the short term we think it's not the best solution in the long term. We tout ourselves as an HTML5 exporter, replacement for Flash etc, having any Flash anywhere in it seems like it's cheating a bit!
- musket 15y ago
  also fps on chrome was really bad. Didn't try ff but on ie its was better.
  - TomGullen 15y ago
    Musket, have you tried enabling Chrome hardware acceleration in the settings? http://technicallyeasy.net/2011/03/how-to-enable-graphics-hardware-acceleration-google-chrome/ http://technicallyeasy.net/2011/03/how-to-enable-graphics-ha... By default this is disabled, eventually browsers will ship with this enabled by default. It should allow a much better FPS.
  - AshleysBrain 15y ago
    Chrome 14 (out in 6 weeks or so) has a hardware accelerated canvas enabled by default, so should skip along nicely then.
- blueplz 15y ago
  On WinXP: was slow on FF6, but smooth on Chrome 14 Beta. Nice.
  - AshleysBrain 15y ago
    FF6 has hardware acceleration, but only if your drivers are up to date. Maybe try updating your graphics drivers?
kevingadd 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
DevX101 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
    - TomGullen 15y ago
      Me and my brother did use The Games Factory when we were very little, we found it an extremely exciting concept we wish to also create with Construct 2! Thanks for your feedback, and confidence in us :)
    - windsurfer 15y ago
      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 :)
usedtolurk 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Thank you! We appreciate your feedback. We do want to get some videos up as well as more demos soon :)
leej 15y ago
I have a question. Does early adopter license cover future major/minor releases?
- TomGullen 15y ago
  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 http://www.scirra.com/construct2/releases for our release history.
  - leej 15y ago
    Thanks for the response. Sorry but I'm confused. So future major/minor releases are free to upgrade for license owners?
    - TomGullen 15y ago
      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
bo_Olean 15y ago
Games made with Construct 2 From the Demo page: Space Blaster Game http://www.scirra.com/demos/space-blaster/index.html http://www.scirra.com/demos/space-blaster/index.html Ghost Shooter http://www.scirra.com/demos/ghost-shooter/index.html http://www.scirra.com/demos/ghost-shooter/index.html Works awesome in Chrome 13.0.x Impressive!
- TomGullen 15y ago
  Thanks :D
davidotoole 15y ago
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 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/ http://blocky.io/blog/2011/07/07/go-check-out-schemebricks/

68 points by e1ven 15y ago

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)

TomGullen 15y ago
Sound implementation is extremely buggy and poor in all browsers, hopefully browser vendors will work to resolve this soon. It's really hard for developers to work with at the moment.
- Egregore 15y ago
  I've seen some html5 frameworks implement sound through flash (as a temporary step backward)
  - TomGullen 15y ago
    As useful as this would be in the short term we think it's not the best solution in the long term. We tout ourselves as an HTML5 exporter, replacement for Flash etc, having any Flash anywhere in it seems like it's cheating a bit!
musket 15y ago
also fps on chrome was really bad. Didn't try ff but on ie its was better.
- TomGullen 15y ago
  Musket, have you tried enabling Chrome hardware acceleration in the settings? http://technicallyeasy.net/2011/03/how-to-enable-graphics-hardware-acceleration-google-chrome/ http://technicallyeasy.net/2011/03/how-to-enable-graphics-ha... By default this is disabled, eventually browsers will ship with this enabled by default. It should allow a much better FPS.
- AshleysBrain 15y ago
  Chrome 14 (out in 6 weeks or so) has a hardware accelerated canvas enabled by default, so should skip along nicely then.
blueplz 15y ago
On WinXP: was slow on FF6, but smooth on Chrome 14 Beta. Nice.
- AshleysBrain 15y ago
  FF6 has hardware acceleration, but only if your drivers are up to date. Maybe try updating your graphics drivers?

kevingadd 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

DevX101 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - TomGullen 15y ago
    Me and my brother did use The Games Factory when we were very little, we found it an extremely exciting concept we wish to also create with Construct 2! Thanks for your feedback, and confidence in us :)
  - windsurfer 15y ago
    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 :)

usedtolurk 15y ago

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 15y ago
Thank you! We appreciate your feedback. We do want to get some videos up as well as more demos soon :)

leej 15y ago

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

TomGullen 15y ago
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 http://www.scirra.com/construct2/releases for our release history.
- leej 15y ago
  Thanks for the response. Sorry but I'm confused. So future major/minor releases are free to upgrade for license owners?
  - TomGullen 15y ago
    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

bo_Olean 15y ago

Games made with Construct 2 From the Demo page: Space Blaster Game http://www.scirra.com/demos/space-blaster/index.html http://www.scirra.com/demos/space-blaster/index.html Ghost Shooter http://www.scirra.com/demos/ghost-shooter/index.html http://www.scirra.com/demos/ghost-shooter/index.html Works awesome in Chrome 13.0.x Impressive!

TomGullen 15y ago
Thanks :D

davidotoole 15y ago

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 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/ http://blocky.io/blog/2011/07/07/go-check-out-schemebricks/