Construct Classic was released in October 2007. Construct 2 followed in February 2011. Now we're coming up to four years and 200 releases later, we feel it is now time to consider the next step for Construct.
We frequently get requests for significant features which are very difficult to achieve with our current editor. These include:
- Support for Mac and Linux
- Translation to languages other than English
- Third-party extensibility of the editor (an editor plugin SDK)
- Project modularity features (such as designing new kinds of plugins purely in events, or ways to usefully share functions or groups of events)
- Other editor-focused features (e.g. array contents editor, refactoring tools)
We feel Construct 2 is mature software and successfully achieves its goal of being an easy-to-use game editor. However we need to address the above requests eventually, and to do this it is necessary to build a whole new editor. This will be Construct 3.
Building Construct 3 is an ambitious project. However we believe the Construct 2 runtime already serves excellently as a feature-rich, powerful and high-performance engine for HTML5 games. Therefore we only aim to build a new editor, and we will continue to use the same cross-platform runtime that already supports thousands of games. This will reduce our workload and help us focus on perfecting the editor. We hope to also increase our development speed by hiring additional developers in the near future.
Building Construct 3 will also take time. During this time we will simply not have the resources to simultaneously design a next generation editor and keep up the rapid release cycle of Construct 2 updates. Consequently the rate of Construct 2 updates will slow down. We will keep maintaining it, since it's important to ensure bugs are fixed and that the runtime keeps up with the fast pace of browser development. So it should not be a complete drop off, just a slow down. Also the HTML5 gaming platform will continue to improve as browsers add new features and further improve performance, so progress should keep up pace there too.
We would like to emphasise that we still strongly believe Construct 2 is a great tool for game development. Construct 3 is likely a long way off, and upon its release we plan to have a great upgrade deal for existing Construct 2 users. Further, we are confident Construct 3 will be able to import Construct 2 projects, allowing you to easily transition over. So there should be no reason to hold off buying a Construct 2 license in the mean time.
We ask for your patience while we get to work on this exciting next step for Construct, and we will be sure to keep you updated with further news as soon as we're ready to share it.