We've been hard at work for the past few months, so I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on what we've done, and what our plans are for the near future.
A quick look back
We first publicly launched Construct 2 about nine months ago, in February. That was release 26, and it was a pretty bare-bones editor. Since then we've been working as fast as we can to get Construct 2 stable and up to speed with features, and now we're up to release 65! That's 40 releases, which is an average one new release every week, continuously, for nine months. Amongst the things we've added are the behaviors system, many event features, the audio engine, the image and animation editor, Physics, offline support, publishing to the Chrome Web Store, Facebook integration, and more recently experimental support for PhoneGap to help you build native phone apps.
We also launched the new website in June. Tom's been hard at work on that as well - like the software, it has been and will continue to be under constant development. Many of the changes are "under the hood" but still very important, so although the site updates are less visible, it's still a crucial part of the Scirra community and has come a long way too! If you haven't clicked around the site in a while, it might be worth having a quick browse - you might spot some new things you hadn't seen before. Tom's currently working on a new Badges system, and there's more to come after that too.
We launched the early-adopter licenses in August. We've been overwhelmed by the positive response and we'd like to thank everyone for your amazing support! We're very grateful and hope to keep up the pace to ensure Construct 2 is the best game creator for you. We're going to keep the early adopter deal going for a while longer as well - we don't have a definite date when the deal will end but we'll be sure to give everyone plenty of notice before it does.
We also just finished our first major competition this weekend - be sure to check out the excellent winning entries if you haven't already!
A quick look forward
So what are our plans for the near future? Being a very small team it's hard to look too far ahead. The new browser wars are in full swing again and HTML5 is moving very quickly. Things tend to change month by month, and we're keen to adapt as things change. So we can't say for sure what we'll be doing by, for example, next summer - I'm sure some surprise changes will have altered our plans in some way. As for the near future, over the winter we have a number of goals.
First of all, we're well aware that the lack of documentation is a problem for many users. Although we have a growing number of tutorials to help get new users up to speed, we don't yet have a manual (this is why many help links in the editor don't work yet). Tom's working on a new Manual section for the site and we hope to have everything documented within a few months. It's a huge job though, so it may take some time before it is completed and ready. We hope to make a downloadable offline copy of the manual too. However, it should make Construct 2 much more accessible and usable for everyone.
Secondly, we're excited by the new support for PhoneGap in Construct 2 r65. This allows you to build your games as native phone apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and webOS. This feature is currently experimental - we're just testing it - but over the coming months we aim to refine it and get it working as smoothly as possible. Please do try it out and let us know how it goes for you!
Finally, there are some important features to get done for the editor. The Families system from Construct Classic allows you to make events which apply to entire groups of object types rather than one object type at a time. This makes it much easier to create large projects, and we want to add equivalent features to Construct 2. The same applies to the Containers system which can link instances together - a crucial feature for many kinds of game.
Of course, we're also literally inundated with a constant stream of excellent suggestions from our community. We can't wait to get all these done - but with so much to do, please don't worry if it takes some time to get round to them! I'm writing down the best suggestions in to my todo list, which is now looking somewhat formidable.
The official Scirra todo list.
And after that
We're tremendously excited to see where Construct 2 goes in future. Not only do we have great ideas from our community, but we also have some crazier big ideas ourselves that we'd love to explore, but we certainly need to get a lot of basics down first. And as I mentioned, it's very difficult to predict what's going to happen with the new web. It'll be exciting to see where it goes though! So stay tuned - you can always get the latest updates as they happen on our Facebook page or Twitter - and we look forwards to bringing you more updates!