Match-3 in Construct 2: part one

Gosh, quite a lot has been happening with Construct 2 since I last posted. The addition of a WebGL renderer speeds games up considerably, Scirra now features an Arcade on their site where you can submit your C2-made treasures and the custom plugin development is basically exploding. That's just to mention a few highlights.

Certainly a good time to come back and do some more blogging. And what's better than a tutorial to brush up on those rusty C2-skills of yours?

One of my more notable achievements with Construct Classic surely was the Match-3 tutorial, which quite a few people seemed to find useful. Since there's always interest in this kind of puzzle games, I decided to put a little effort into creating a similar guide for Construct 2. And here are the humble beginnings:

Wrath of the browsers

Almost half a year has passed since my initial HTML5 performance test. Most browsers have seen various updates and Construct 2 has improved a lot for sure. Time to give this another whirl.

The good news is that the average fps count has risen from a measly 27.6 to 39.8, which means a considerable improvement of 44,2%. Not bad at all.

Let's have a look at the cold hard facts:

Apple's Safari gives quite the phoenix out of the ashes performance and rises from a non-existent framerate the last time to the bronze medal, beating Firefox by 4 fps. While the Mozilla browser can improve and is about one third faster than it was with version 4.0, I still hoped for Firefox to make the leap to the top this time.

Buy Construct 2 now!

As announced the new release 51 of Construct 2 introduces the licensing model, which comes as cheap as 32$ for the standard edition. Needless to say that I grabbed one right away. And while some people might decide to hold out and wait for future developments (the cry for an exe exporter is still everlasting), I think it's a nice way to show your support for the great guys over at Scirra by becoming an early adopter.

Not to mention a bunch of really cool new features in the current C2 version, most notably the wait action, which lets you create delayed actions easily. Also great is the added slope-handling of the Platform movement and the arrival of unbounded scrolling. I'm not even getting into the plethora of bugfixes.

On the downside one could argue that there are now limitations that come with C2, if you decide not to buy a license for now and use the free edition. You'll be limited to 100 events and 4 layers, which should still be enough to do a fair amount of prototyping and beyond.

If you have a little cash lying around, I'd make the case that you could find a worse investment than Construct 2. It might still lack in terms of features, but useability and stability of the software already promise a bright future, which will see it surpass Construct Classic easily. Also HTML5 will gain importance rapidly, one recent sign being Google using the technology for games in their social network.

Still undecided? It can't hurt to head over to Scirra and check out the different versions they are offering. Oh, did I mention that C2 comes with graphics and audio assets now?

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!

Clash of the browsers

In the light of the recent Firefox 4 release, I decided to get all my browsers updated to the most recent version and give it a whirl with some Construct created HTML5 goodness. I used the sun example again, which serves as a relatively hefty benchmark I guess. There are objects being constantly created, destroyed, resized and the additive effect is being used after all.

Let's take a look at the FPS ranking of the different browsers:

1. Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421        54 FPS
2. Google Chrome 10.0.648.204             38 FPS
3. Firefox 4.0                                        24 FPS
4. Opera 11.01                                      22 FPS
5. Firefox 3.6.16                                   14 FPS
6. Safari 5.04                                        Freeze!

To my surprise IE 9 pretty much wiped the floor with the competition I have to say! It even has a big margin over the often praised Chrome browser, which still easily secures a good second place. 

Can you do that with HTML5?

I have already been babbling about what Construct 2 is capable of doing in its current state. Now in the light of the previous post, where I demonstrated a way to create a sun effect, I was wondering... could this be done already in C2?

Let's have a look at a list of features/objects I have been using for that sun in Construct 1:

- sprite object

- gradient object

- additive effect

- color filter

- distort map

- hash table object
- delta time 
- while loop
- rotation behavior
- global variables

Green color means it is already available in C2, red colored features are only available in C1. That doesn't look too promising to be honest. But let's give it a quick shot anyway!

Construct 2 you say?!?

We do have Construct 2 public previews for a while now. Despite of it being still very basic in terms of features, the most impressive thing about it might be that if you used the previous Construct version before, you intuitively already know how to handle version 2. And at the same time it feels very slick and more user-friendly already.

But what is it that you can actually already create in Construct 2? Some pretty impressive examples can be found inside this thread. There are already little versions of Asteroids, Super Mario and Pong. Granted, these demos mostly only scratch the surface of the games they try to emulate, but considering the early state of C2 I'm pleased with the outcome so far.

Here's hoping that all major browsers will adapt hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvases yesterday (I'm looking at you, Firefox!). And that we will get to see some important features soon in C2, namely an integrated image editor and animations. A recent most wanted features poll indicates that this might happen soon. Other than that I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the soon addition of an OpenGL exe-exporter.

We are Construct!

Hello world!

You have just stumbled upon a new blog with the main focus on game development with the fabulous 2D game creation software 'Construct' by Scirra. We seek to cover news, updates, games, tutorials and generally everything that's going on in the Construct community.

In case you've never heard of Construct, but are interested in 2D game development, I'd suggest you click here, learn more about the software and download it asap. It's free and easy to use!

Maybe you're already a Construct user and frequent the official forums regularly. You have come to the right place! This blog is being maintained by fellow Constructors just like yourself. We hope to become a valuable resource for all things Construct and will provide things like plugin overviews and exclusive tutorials in the future. So it should pay off to check back often.

That's it for this brief introduction, take care!