Developing Construct 3 has been a long journey. As far back as late 2012 we were experimenting with what could be done with a browser-based editor. Construct 3 development really going going in mid-2014. Our first official announcement of Construct 3 was in early 2015. The first public beta was released in March this year, and subscriptions became available in June. Now after around 8 months in beta we've closed around 1000 bug reports, added a range of new features, and worked hard to ensure Construct 3 is generally robust for widespread use. So we're now incredibly pleased to be able take off the beta and fully launch Construct 3! It's taken around three and a half years of continuous development to reach this point, and we've pushed the web platform further than we've ever pushed it before, with great results.
Construct 3 is now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android and iOS, in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge, as well as other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Yandex. The interface is available in English, French and very soon we'll also add Russian, with several other translations in progress including Portuguese (BR), Spanish and German.
We're also pleased to announce that as well as the existing card payment option, you can now also purchase Construct 3 plans with Paypal! At checkout, simply choose Paypal from the dropdown list under Your payment method.
The latest r71 release is our first stable release of Construct 3. From now on visiting editor.construct.net will load the latest stable release, ensuring that if anything unexpected happens with a beta release it won't affect users who just want to be productive. Users interested in the latest beta will be able to try them out at the release's specific URL, e.g. editor.construct.net/r72 (when it comes out).
Progress since the beta
Since launching the public beta, we added support for all major browsers, a comprehensive manual, a new tutorials section, an all-new mobile app build service, new IAP and ad plugins, support for making Xbox One games, as well as over a hundred other additions and changes across over 60 separate releases. Despite having no link to Construct 3 on the Scirra homepage until now, Construct 3 has had over 100,000 unique users so far, including over 15,000 sessions where Construct 3 was used more than 100 times, adding up to a total of over 12 years of usage! We're also pleased to report that our new web service construct.net has had 99.999% uptime since the launch of the beta, and we've seen strong sales for Construct 3 already. The future's bright!
Our next plans
Despite fully launching Construct 3, we're far from done. We'll be continuing to develop Construct 3 with regular releases and there are some major new features in the pipeline. We have some exciting plans for 2018 and we're looking forwards to sharing more information about them in the near future. However in the mean time, we can reveal that work is well underway on the new Construct 3 runtime. This will bring significant performance gains, improve reliability and maintainability, and open the door to adding a range of impressive new features beyond its release.
It'll take some time to transition from the old runtime to the new, but we hope to at least provide a pre-release testing version in the first half of 2018, and we aim to have completed the transition to the new engine by the end of 2018. This is quite an ambitious goal given the scope of the project; there are tens of thousands of lines of code in the runtime, and we will try to preserve compatibility with the old runtime to help make it smoother to port existing projects over to it.
That's not all, though! We'll have more to talk about throughout 2018. We're proud to launch Construct 3 today and we're confident it has a bright future with more exciting developments on the way. Want to give it a spin? You can try Construct 3 free simply by visiting editor.construct.net.