Scirra.com redesign

For a few days now you can enjoy the completely redesigned Scirra website, which keeps the green color scheme, but has a much cleaner and more professional look to it. Definitely an overdue step in the right direction regarding Scirra's future business plans with Construct 2.

Most importantly the new site now properly integrates the forum, forming a single community-friendly entity. There are more interactive features like a blog you can comment on and a special section to post indepth tutorials. All that's complemented by a reputation points system, which is supposed to reward you for contributing. A nice little touch, which will hopefully encourage good content rather than wake some of the spam devils.

As expected there are a few minor quirks to be worked out, some of which already have been addressed, like the too big font in forum posts. Also it seems to take some time to spread the word about gravatar.com, which is now the service used for displaying the avatar image (many reputable sites use it, this is not evil ;).

Overall I'm quite happy with the new face of Scirra and the efforts that are made to make the site a better community. They promise there's more to come and with Construct 2 dropping new builds left and right at the moment, it surely seems this will gonna be a good summer for all users!

Construct 2 release 43

I have to admit I skipped a few preview builds, but this one introduces some features that have me instantly interested again.

Time scaling is now available in Construct 2, with the ability to set the scale individually for objects instead of only globally. Pretty sweet!

Another important addition is the Custom Movement behavior, which should open up a whole lot of new possibilities. Also a few other minor behaviors have their debut, like the "Destroy outside layout" or the "Wrap" behavior.

Head over to the official thread for the complete changelog and download the release. Have fun!

Have a happy inventory!

Do you like inventories? Oh, I know you do. Because everybody does. It's a shame though that in the last few years, probably in a misguided attempt to make RPGs more accessible to console players, many games feature bothersome lists of objects you have to endlessly scroll through to find the desired item. Better take a look at the awesome inventory from Deus Ex:

My absolutely favorite kind of inventory: a grid of cells, with bigger objects eventually taking up more space than just one cell. It just feels right to me. Now you might not share my preference on this, but let me roll a bit with it as I try to talk briefly about including such a feature in a Construct project.