For a long time now, users have developed addons for Construct and shared them in the forums for other users to download. But as time went by, Dropbox stopped supporting the public folder, developers left the forums and slowly addons went undeveloped, their links dead. The only way to access those addons was to trawl the forums, ask the devs nicely to update their links, or to consult the most recent 'addon list'. I don't know about you, but that seems rather inefficient.
So in light of this, we're delighted to announce the Construct addon exchange – the online repository for any and all free Construct 2 or Construct 3 addons! No longer will you have to rummage through years-old threads looking for a download link that works, just visit the addon exchange and search for what you want. Much easier!
The exchange shows you all available free addons for either Construct 2 or Construct 3. You'll see all of our built-in addons, as well as any official addons we release, plus anything that the community has made.
https://www.construct.net/make-games/addons
Talking of official addons, if you head over to the exchange, you'll notice that the Greenworks Plugin is available, for both C2 and C3! That's right; you can now use the Greenworks plugin to access the Steamworks API from the NW.js exporter in Construct 3. Check out the plugin here, with full documentation.
But what about developers, I hear you say. What features do they get access to? Well, I'm glad you asked.
- Create multiple releases for your addons. Need to do an update? Just upload a new release. All previous versions will still be available, and you can include release notes for all of your uploads. Plus, keep an eye on how your addon is doing with download tracking!
- Working on a cool new feature but not sure how well it will play with existing features? Upload the version as a beta. Addons can have both stable and beta branches if you want to!
- Make sure your users know how to implement your addon by including complete documentation or example projects for demonstration purposes. If you've uploaded a Construct 3 addon, the exchange will automatically generate a list of ACEs (Actions, Conditions & Expressions) so your users know what to expect.
- Tag your addons to improve discoverability in the search engine or mark it as deprecated if you're no longer working on it.
- Have a Patreon? Add the link to your addon so users can more easily support you!
And as for you users, you'll be able to comment (unless the developer has turned them off) and vote for your favourite addons as well as follow them to receive notifications when the addon is updated!
We're largely happy with the addon exchange as it stands, but we do have some more plans for the future.
Once we've completed the new store, we'll be adding support in the addon exchange for additional license types as well as the distribution of paid-for addons. Currently, the only license available is an MIT license but if you have any other needs drop us an email and we're happy to discuss them!
We also want to integrate the addon manager directly into the Construct 3 editor to make it even easier to find new or update your existing addons.
So there you have it, construct.net's shiny new addon exchange. We're delighted with how it's turned out, and we hope you are too, but if you have any ideas or feedback we'd love to hear them! In the meantime, if you're a user then head over to the exchange and see what's available and if you're a developer, why not upload some addons yourself?