We're coming towards the end of another year, and it's time for our annual look back at the highlights of what the team got done through 2025 to make both Construct 3 and Construct Animate even better than ever!
Construct releases
Through 2025 we made 55 releases of Construct - a little over one a week - covering r421 to r466. As ever you can find all the details on the releases page, but here are some of the highlights of new features released this year.
Construct Game Services
A major feature we've been developing this year are a set of online services for games, including authentication, leaderboards, cloud save and more!
You can access these using the built-in Construct Game Services plugin. We've also been hard at work on a new dashboard where you can sign in to set up and manage your games, which you can find at cgs.construct.net.
So far Construct Game Services has remained in beta. However we're preparing for a full launch early next year, and we have more features on the way too, so stay tuned for more news on that.
Asset Browser
This year we also added a brand-new Asset Browser in the editor to help you easily find assets and import them to your projects. It includes thousands of free assets by Kenney.nl to help you get started, and also includes premium assets for subscribers, purchases from our Asset Store, as well as the ability to add local folders on your system so it can also include any other asset libraries you've got.
Construct's new Asset BrowserWith the user interface improvements in our latest release, you can also click the pin icon to display the bar in auto-hide mode, saving space on your screen while still ensuring you can conveniently access it.
New text & code editor
A significant project this year was moving Construct's built-in text and code editor from CodeMirror to Monaco, a fantastic full-featured editor that powers Visual Studio Code! Changing a core feature that is closely integrated with the editor was challenging, but worth it to bring a big update Construct's coding capabilities. Monaco brings a modern editor with a comprehensive feature set including Go to definition and Peek definition, Find references, the command palette, a code minimap which can be annotated, scrollbar annotations, sticky scrolling, and more.
A view of Construct's new code editor, illustrating the 'Peek definition' feature, and the code minimap on the right.You can find out more about this in our blog post Construct's new text and code editor. If you want to see it in action, try out our Spell Caster Code example. Switching to Monaco also made possible our next new feature!
TypeScript coding in the editor
Back in 2023 we added support for coding projects with TypeScript, but this required using an external code editor. That meant we already had a lot of the infrastructure for TypeScript support, and the new Monaco code editor has TypeScript support built-in. So for us it was a no-brainer to move on to adding TypeScript support inside the editor itself, so you don't have to use an external code editor any more. We covered this in more detail in the blog post Construct now has built-in support for TypeScript.
TypeScript essentially adds a static type system on top of JavaScript. This makes it much easier to handle large codebases, and we believe it is likely a better choice for beginners to learn, as it helps catch many types of errors before you preview your project. We aimed to bring all the support and documentation for TypeScript up to the same level as Construct's existing JavaScript support. That included releasing a free 14-part course Learn TypeScript in Construct, and creating nearly 50 example projects using TypeScript which you can find in the Example Browser (clear all filters, expand the Coding header, and click TypeScript to see them all).
We've always believed that it's far better for tools to integrate existing programming languages than develop tool-specific languages. JavaScript and TypeScript remain amongst the most popular programming languages in the world. The industry invests vast development resources in to them, resulting in far better features and far better performance than any tool-specific languages, which are doomed to forever lag behind. With such wide usage across the industry there are many career options available, so learning them might just help you on your way to your next job. For this reason, along with the improved error detection, we think TypeScript is an excellent choice in education.
Unlimited lines of code in free edition
To complement Construct's new and improved coding capabilities, this year we also relaxed the free edition limit on the number of lines of code you can write. It's now unlimited! So you can write code to your heart's content without needing a subscription.
Auto-updating addons
To help make it easy to manage installed addons, we added support for auto-updating addons installed from the Addons website. Now when addon developers publish an update, it will automatically update it for the addon's users, making life easier for both developers and users, and avoiding compatibility problems that might come from out-of-date addons.
MIDI plugin
Construct is designed to handle serious projects, but it's also about having fun with cool features too! This year we added a built-in MIDI plugin, allowing access to musical devices like keyboards and synthesizers. This makes possible music-driven games and is great fun to experiment with. If you have a MIDI device available, try out our MIDI input example to see it in action.
Construct's MIDI input exampleLoads more!
One of the challenges of adding so many things to Construct is it makes it difficult to list everything! Here are some more highlights we've picked out from this year:
- A great deal of improvements for our newer desktop export options Windows WebView2, macOS WKWebView, and Linux CEF, including improvements for the Steamworks plugin
- Support for Physics per-instance collision filtering
- Improved multi-monitor support, re-opening popup windows in their previously used location in both the editor and debugger
- Debugger improvements including updating the CPU profiler to show individual plugin/behavior processing time, and a new section for inspecting timelines
- Support for Multiplayer binary data transfers, allowing transfers of larger amounts of data such as files between peers
- Many usability improvements for the editor, including updates for the Properties Bar, and the ability to rename the built-in Functions object
- Support for back face culling with 3D shape
- Lots of 9-patch improvements, allowing per-instance settings, loading images from URL, changing margins, a new image scale option, and more
- Better subfolder support, lifting a long-standing limitation preventing using the same filename in different subfolders, and allowing reserved filenames like index.html in subfolders
- Performance improvements for spritesheets, event sheets, rendering, text layout, the editor and more
Release videos
Most of our stable releases go out with a short video demonstrating some of the highlights in that release. You can catch up with many of our improvements this year in video form by watching the r424, r432, r440, r449 and r466 release videos.
Showreel
This year we also prepared a showreel video to highlight some of the amazing things people have been building in Construct. Take a look below!
New examples and demo games
This year we added an impressive 81 examples to Construct's Example Browser, many developed by our partners at Forsteri Studios.
Some of the examples added to Construct in 2025These provide everything from examples of specific Construct features to full demo games. They're a great way to learn more about Construct, so take a look!
One of these examples Synth Sunset was designed to highlight Construct's timeline animations feature. We published a video of this one to YouTube - exported directly from Construct Animate - which we've included below.
LTS releases
This year's LTS release was r449.3, which will be supported until the end of 2026. The previous r397 LTS releases reach their end of support very soon at the end of this year, so be sure to update if you haven't already!
This year's LTS release is also a major compatibility milestone. In order to ensure we can keep improving Construct in the long term, it's important to eventually retire features that are deprecated, have been superseded, or have otherwise been holding it back. In r450+ we retired support for legacy (SDK v1) third-party plugins and behaviors, the NW.js exporter, support for Windows 32-bit (x86) and Linux ARM 32-bit export options, the legacy "flat" export file structure, and the legacy "file" scheme for Android and iOS. The r449.x LTS releases will continue supporting all of these until the end of 2026 to help ease the transition. We know these compatibility changes can be awkward, but they are necessary to make sure we can keep making Construct better. We've already made some improvements in the latest releases have only been made possible by retiring these features.
Web technology advances
As ever the web platform continues to improve, benefiting both Construct and all your projects, and the rest of the web ecosystem too. As with every year, absolutely loads of work was done on the web platform this year, but here we have some highlights most relevant to Construct.
WebGPU
The biggest web platform improvement this year was support for WebGPU. This is a completely new graphics technology for the web, designed as a successor to WebGL. For more background on WebGPU, see the blog posts A brief history of graphics on the web and WebGPU and From WebGL to WebGPU in Construct.
We actually first started work on an experimental WebGPU renderer for Construct back in 2020, and made it available as an option in 2023 (announced in the blog post Introducing Construct's new WebGPU renderer). In 2025 we finally enabled it by default, so both Construct projects and the Construct editor itself are now rendering with WebGPU when supported. With the release of Firefox 141 and Safari 26 this year, WebGPU is now also supported in all major browsers.
With the roll-out we ran in to a few hiccups that appeared to be caused by graphics driver bugs, which is not really unusual for any technology when making significant graphics changes. Thanks to some help from Google we believe these are mostly worked around. Our data shows the vast majority of users are now using the WebGPU renderer. If you didn't notice anything, that's a good result! It takes a great deal of work to change to a new and different technology while ensuring everything works exactly the same.
The five year time span from experimenting with WebGPU to rolling it out to everyone enabled by default illustrates the kinds of long-term investments we make to keep improving Construct and stay at the forefront of web technology. There are some exciting WebGPU improvements on the horizon and we're now well placed to take advantage when they come!
Other web platform improvements
Here's a selection of some other web platform improvements this year:
- The modern AVIF image format is now widely supported, and so we've also enabled it by default for lossy images in Construct. (WebP is still better for lossless images, so that remains the default for lossless.) We covered AVIF in last year's blog post Video and image improvements in Construct. AVIF is so good in many cases you can set your entire project to use lossy images and get a significant download size reduction while preserving good enough artwork quality, something we covered in more detail in the blog post Reducing download sizes with lossy spritesheets.
- Safari 26 added support for audio encoding with WebCodecs, finally ensuring this capability is supported across all major browsers. This allows Construct Animate's faster-than-realtime video export to include audio.
- JavaScript minifying tools have been quite troublesome for many years, and having been through both Google Closure Compiler and UglifyJS, this year we switched again this time to terser. It's proved to be a good choice with good quality minification and support for the latest JavaScript features, helping ensure we can modernize Construct's codebase without having to worry too much about minifier support.
- Chrome added support for the File System Access API on Android, meaning Construct's File System plugin can now work on Android too. It's not yet supported in Android apps though, as bringing support to the Android Webview required updates to the Android OS. These changes should come through in 2026 after which it should also be possible to support in Android apps.
- Chrome and Firefox added support for moving DOM elements while preserving state (with
moveBefore()). This fixes a problem where doing something like changing the Z order of an iframe caused the iframe to reload if it had to change its location in the DOM. Hopefully Safari support follows soon.
- Float16Array became widely supported, allowing us to optimize both the WebGL and WebGPU renderers to use smaller and more efficient data types in some cases (with 16-bit floats being half the size of 32-bit floats, which used to be the next smallest available).
- Chrome added support for encoding videos with the H.265 codec, providing additional video format options for both Construct's Video Recorder plugin and Construct Animate's video export feature.
- Chromium-based browsers still cannot choose between the low-power and high-performance GPUs on dual-GPU systems (like some gaming laptops) from JavaScript code, either with WebGL or WebGPU. However we've been working with Google on a workaround which should make it possible to select the high performance GPU in the Windows WebView2 exporter, which should become available early next year.
Blog posts
Some of the blog posts we published this year include:
Developer diaries
We also published two more entries in our Developer Diaries series this year:
You can find more past entries by browsing blog posts with the developer-diaries tag. There's a lot in the archives now!
More to come next year!
Once again we've worked hard and had a highly productive year bringing you as many fantastic updates to Construct as we can possibly manage. It's taken a long time even just to list everything we got done this year! That's in large part thanks to the web platform, helping accelerate our development with a single codebase that runs on all platforms. However it is still not enough, and we shall not rest: there is more to be done, and we're going to keep working hard through 2026 to continue making Construct better. As ever there's also much more going on behind-the-scenes, and we have some exciting projects in the works that we can't wait to share with you! There's also always lots happening behind-the-scenes with support, updating the website, maintaining services, and all the other admin and finance work involved in running a business. The team have done a great job this year and we'll be taking a well-earned break over the next couple of weeks for the winter holidays. 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. And if you want to take a trip down memory lane, you can also find our year-in-review blog posts from 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.