Once again we're reaching the end of a busy year where the team worked hard and got a great deal done, aiming to bring you the best game creation software possible! As we near the end of the year, let's take a look back at some highlights of 2022.
There's also our previous review of 2021 if you want to go back further.
Construct updates
Through 2022 we made 56 releases of Construct (so far!) - just over one a week - covering r277 to r322. As ever you can find all the details on the releases page, but here are some of the highlights!
New Start Page and Example Browser
This year we completely redesigned Construct's Start Page, and introduced a new dedicated example browser! Construct now comes with so many examples - nearly 300 now - that it was worth building a separate view for them so you can find what you're looking for. You can click here to jump straight to the Example Browser and check it out right now in your browser. Find out more in our blog post Explore hundreds of examples in Construct's new Example Browser.
The new Example BrowserTemplates
We also introduced a new templates feature, helping you manage lots of instances across large projects. In short one instance can be set to be a "template", and other instances set to be a "replica" of it. Then whenever you edit the template, all the replicas automatically update. You can also use the feature to update hierarchies across the project too, as well as choosing between presets to create at runtime. Learn more in the manual section on templates.
HTML Element
The new HTML Element plugin opens up the whole world of HTML and CSS for use in your games. This can be used for everything from data tables to advanced typography, and is also a great way to conveniently design user interfaces. See our blog post Design UIs with HTML and CSS in Construct.
An example scrollable hi-score table made with HTML and CSS.Timeline improvements
Among a great many improvements to the use of timelines in Construct are new support for auto-keyframing, an updated appearance, new toolbar options, better keyboard shortcuts, usability improvements, and much more.
3D improvements
While Construct remains primarily a 2D engine, we still made a number of improvements to the Construct's 3D support, as ever focusing on simple and easy-to-use features with exciting potential. These include the new Z axis scale setting for a regular co-ordinate system, customizing the field of view, and setting the near/far camera distance. There's also improved support for transparency, especially with retro-style pixellated artwork, as transparent pixels no longer fill in the depth buffer.
Tile randomization
Ever noticed a tiled image obviously repeating? In the latest betas you can enable tile randomization for Tiled Background objects with just one click, and it automatically breaks up the repetitive appearance.
Break up repetitive tiling with Tile Randomization.Layer interactive setting
You can now turn off an interactive setting for layers, meaning they will not respond to any mouse or touch input. It's a great way to conveniently manage things like hidden menus and dialogs that shouldn't be interactive until they are needed.
New guided tours
Our guided tours are perfect to help get complete beginners started with various features in Construct. The new Make a platform game guided tour is our new suggested guided tour for first time users. There's also Get started with timeline animations and Get started with JavaScript to help introduce beginners to other parts of Construct.
Sliding for 8-direction
Despite having been a part of Construct for many years, we still made a big improvement to the 8-direction behavior. The new Allow sliding setting lets the movement slide past slopes and other angled obstacles, which can be a much more natural kind of movement for some kinds of games.
Usability improvements
Amongst many improvements made this year were some debugger improvements, including a new search box, a Hide unused setting, and lots of new properties when inspecting objects. We also significantly overhauled the project search features, with new toolbars, extra filtering options, live updates as you type, and options to search both project files and event sheets. Effects got some attention too with a new enabled setting for individual effects in the editor, an Is enabled condition, and autocomplete for effect names in actions. There were many more smaller changes made to help ensure a smooth experience using Construct.
Subfolder improvements
Using subfolders in the Project Bar now properly creates folders both in your project on disk, and on export. It sounds straightforward, but it was a complicated upgrade! However the use of folders in Construct is now more intuitive. It also better supports source control tools like Git with folder projects.
Scripting improvements
This year we kept working on Construct's JavaScript coding capabilities, and it's come on leaps and bounds: Construct is now a robust and professional coding tool, in addition to the ever-important event sheets coding alternative. Amongst this year's coding improvements are loads of new script interfaces to access Construct's plugins and behaviors, ranging from Particles and Multiplayer to ray-casting with the LOS behavior, multithreaded A* pathfinding with the Pathfinding behavior, and dynamic tweens for animation; more APIs to access built-in features; coding editor improvements; support for the latest JavaScript language features; and much more. See our feature focus on JavaScript coding for more, and take a look at our RTS game development side-project which showcases what's possible with JavaScript coding in Construct.
Loads more!
There was loads more we did, but it's too much to list here. Over this time our changelogs show we added 8 major new features, 135 additions, 107 changes, 76 scripting improvements, 14 performance optimizations, 8 SDK updates, 34 new example projects and 350 bug fixes.
Feature suggestions
We've also been running a feature suggestion platform where people can submit ideas for Construct and vote on them. We have lots of enthusiastic users with endless suggestions, which is great! We'd do them all if we had the time. Unfortunately we are constantly inundated with far, far more suggestions than we could possibly act on, so we can only do some of them. Of 487 submitted suggestions at time of writing, we've implemented 41, which you can view here. These include major features like sub-layers, all the way through to small but desirable tweaks to the user interface, and were the source of several improvements already mentioned like the layer interactive setting, 'Allow sliding' for 8-direction, setting the camera near/far distance, new script interfaces, and more. It's also worth noting that we also frequently make changes based on feedback from other sources, including email support, social media, bug reports, and our forums, as well as coming up with our own ideas which are often also well-received even though nobody posted a suggestion for it - so the suggestions platform is only part of the whole picture!
This suggestion platform has actually been up about 18 months now; if we extrapolate from implementing 41 suggestions over that time, then at the same rate it would take us about 16 years to implement all the rest! And that doesn't even count all the extra suggestions that would be submitted during that time. This demonstrates that while we'd love to implement everyone's ideas, unfortunately the reality is the volume of suggestions is just far too high for us to act on most of them. Still, it's a good source of ideas and we do try to focus on the more highly voted ones.
We've been using a suggestion system for several years now and in order to keep it fresh and relevant, and prevent a truly inconceivable amount of work building up on it, our new policy is to wipe the slate clean every year. So early next year we'll start over and archive all the old suggestions. Bear that in mind if you're about to go and submit something just now!
Construct Animate
This year we also announced a whole new product - Construct Animate! This has been in public beta for the latter half of the year and we've already made a wide range of improvements, including loads of Timeline Bar improvements, support for exporting MP4 and WebM videos, GIFs, and image sequences (e.g. a PNG file per frame). So if you haven't tried it in a while, give it another spin! We're on track to fully launch Construct Animate early next year, so stay tuned for more news.
Web technology advances
Browser updates continue to advance the web platform, benefiting both Construct itself and all your games. Some highlights of web platforms updates this year include:
- You can now associate the .c3p file extension with Construct when installing it as an app in Chrome or Edge
- Construct can now list all your locally installed fonts when choosing a font for the Text object
- Broad support for the WebP image format meant we could add support for exporting your projects using both lossless and lossy WebP images, saving 20-30% of the download size of images with little downside. See our blog post on Exporting smaller projects with WebP images for more details.
Browsers are regularly updated with the latest efforts of hundreds of engineers from some of the biggest tech companies, including new features, improved technology, and performance optimizations. We've long been fans of the web platform and we're always excited to see it keep developing further! The advances will keep coming, not least of which is WebGPU which we're looking forwards to seeing supported next year - and Construct has a full WebGPU renderer already implemented and ready to go. We'll definitely blog more about that when it's out!
Blog posts
Other than the blog posts we've already linked to, we highlighted Construct's outstanding performance, where it can achieve impressive results even on years-old mobile phones. We also reached 300 releases of Construct and took a look back at the past 100 releases.
Feature Focus
This year we also ran an occasional blog series highlighting some of the best features in Construct. These covered:
RTS game project
Our RTS game development part-time side-project aims to showcase what's possible with JavaScript coding in Construct. It got going in September and there's so far been 8 blog post updates about it over on Ashley's blog, with a more recent round-up blog post summarising progress so far.
Education
And while we have been doing all that, the use of Construct in education, from elementary schools to universities, continues to be on the increase. It's used to teach not just Game Design, but also Computational Thinking and Coding in a compelling and engaging manner. To support those customers we have also been exhibiting at BETT in the UK and ISTE, CSTA and ACTE in the USA. It has been a busy year on the education front too!
More to come next year!
The team's worked really hard this year - there's also much more going on behind-the-scenes than you see in Construct updates, including providing support, updating the website, maintaining services, attending conferences, and all the other admin and finance work involved in running a business. We all got a great deal done this year! Next week will be the last beta release of the year, after which the team will be taking a well-earned break over the following couple of weeks. Please note support will be limited during that time and it may take longer for us to get back to you, and beta releases will stop until early next year. We will be back to full steam ahead in early January where there's still plenty more to be done to make Construct better than ever through 2023 and beyond!