What next for Construct 2?

Debugger, PLEASE.

... and better functionality and support for mobile devices export. I know this doesn't depends only of Scirra, but maybe you can be in touch more often with guys from AppMobi and Ludei.

Thank you!

Thank you for this

Everything looks tasty but I do really believe that Tilemaps (which were supported in Clasic so maybe some code is salvageable) are what would benefit a larger amount of games.

The "convenience" choices like debug, modularity and instance search are that....conveniences. Anyone that has been using C2 for longer than a month has already learned how to "dance around" those limitations.

And yes, I agree with the people in this thread saying that it's too early for multiplayer. It is a big feature for you to implement, a hard one to use and not all games want to be multiplayer anyways.

Anyways, my 2c. I would be happy regardless what you choose to throw our way <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I'm sure it's a long shot, but I'll just cast a vote for "Something Else" and hope for static 3D objects similar to Construct Classic. I loved making 3D levels with 2D characters.

Being that gamezilla.net has over 10,000 flash games and they are all single player. I vote for multiplayer ability so that C2 will enter a growing market. I know this can take 6months to a year but playing multiplayer makes it more fun. I'm also suggesting that multiplayer can come with some kind of chat feature to so they can chat in game. Hopefully, multiplayer can expand to 4,5,6, or 10 during 1 game in the future.

We really need to have a better IDE.

We need to be able to debug. Step through code, trace variables.

We need better code analytics - which object are never used which functions don't exit. etcWorking on a large project with three developers highlights how poor the C2 environment is.

We need bookmarks in the event sheet so that we can just "ctrl-2" and jump down to bookmark 2.

In design we need rulers and guidlines. Ala photoshop so that we design our screens easier.

We need a decent bitmap font system. The spritefont as a 3rd party plugin doesn't cut it.

We need keyboard shortcuts in the even sheet. ctrl-home jump to the top. ctrl-end jump to the bottom.

We need to be able to merge projects.

We need to be able to search across all event sheets. e.g., find where this variable is created.

We need Local variables that are only available within that event sheet.

You need to make it much easier to collaborate on a project with multiple developers. At the moment the entire IDE is way too basic.

I believe your next push should really be around making C2 easier to use. Give us tools that help development and aid maintenance and collaboration.

I really enjoy the results I am getting from C2 but compared to development environments that I am used to working with C2 is very primitive and requires many work arounds and "tricks" to get much productivity out of it.

Obviously I am not talking about a project with one layout and one event sheet but you try working with 20 layouts and just as many event sheets and that really highlights the short comings.

Voted for tilemaps. I decided on using Game Maker for my current project because of this reason. The wizard for extracting tiles is perfect in game maker, but the tilemapping is moderate. C2 could make a stride in this area by doing much more, with copy past tile region, line and paint bucket tool, along with the tile wizard. 8)

As for the multiplayer, if your not going to implement it in an easy use form for non programmers, then why implement it at all if your not confident in programming it yourself? It's game maker tool, not C++. The idea is to make it easy for all users.

The tilemap feature would make my life easier a lot, also, officially supporting common tiled map formats can give Construct 2 a good advantage over the concurrence, but all the features suggested are very well suggested =

About the multiplayer, I can see too much trouble coming with it, and 6 months of hard work, while everybody else will be waiting for minor features. But doesn't matter, everything you do is good, and I'm sure you will never feature something bad finished.

As much as I'd like to see proper tileset support (and better sprite/animation tools) and real-time multiplayer, I think now is the time in Construct's lifecycle for it to become a little more refined. We have a lot of features to play with now - so many more than when I bought the software not even six months ago. The growth has been phenomenal and some of the features have been substantial additions. But many of these features have come at such a pace that they're still not properly documented or covered by tutorials. I guess that will come with time, so long as we're all given a chance to let the new features soak in.

My thinking is that, for the next few months, Scirra should focus on tightening up the current offerings, and I think a debugger would be an excellent place to start. After that, I love the "modularity" idea to help those developers with large projects.

After that, some attention to the IDE would be great. A better way to organise multiple event sheets and layouts would make me a very happy man, and collaboration tools would go a long way to place C2 on the map.

I'd also really like to see some progress made in the exporting side of things. It feels too messy right now - too confusing to new users with, frankly, too many options. We need a single, all-encompassing, mobile exporter that will unify development and reduce new user confusion. Then that exporter needs to be tweaked, refined and documented thoroughly. Node-webkit also needs some attention - its own object to be specific; using browser actions for what is considered to be a desktop application is counter-intuitive.

Good luck guys; it's great to see that community feedback continues to be one of the driving forces at Scirra.

I would really like to have the same 3D support as we had in Construct Classic, still keeping everything in 2D. I would love to color code different groups, areas or just comments in the editor, just like in my music software. For debugger it would be good to know what parts of my code are the heaviest and taking the most time to execute.

I voted debugger. IMO the very useful "find references" should be joined with debugger as the debugger needs to dissect a project anyway. I think its worth considering how useful a nice, user friendly, debugger could be for learning C2.

My second choice would be for modularity. This would be awesome for teams. Abstracting complex events as simple modules matches C2's philosophy for simplifying the process.

Third, I think this pole would be much more helpful (statistically) if we could rank our choices rather than selecting our most preferred.

Fourth, all the options sound great and make for a hard choice. C2 is awesome!

I've already cast my vote for debugging (modularity was a close second), but I don't understand the "real-time multiplayer" (rtm) option. There are already WebSocket and Ajax plugins? What more could Ashley do to help? A WebRTC plugin that currently only works on Chrome, Firefox, (and Opera?) and that (at most) 5% of the community will possess the skill to use? I suspect the few people in this community who will ever write a rtm game will also write their own plugin, customized and optimized to their game's needs. However, Ashley indicated that this might be too complex for just plugins and behaviours and if it is then he is the only person who can implement rtm and that would dramatically change my vote.

I love to see this list, because it means Scirra knows exactly what areas I think they should be focusing on.

Debugger is a must - I hand rolled my own quazi debug window, but a native solution would take the framework to the next level, it should be a priority before pretty much anything else.

Modularity is key as well, any improvement in this area will be big for construct users and depending on how it's done could really help people working in small teams.

Everyone and their mother wants to create multiplayer games, but it's still a bit too early. Voted for tilemaps since it would be a massive increase to workflow, but modularity would be very helpful to other contributors in this forum.

Port the editor to other platforms:

Port to BB10 WebWorkers.

I vote for Something Else"

An official support for Sprite Font would be nice.

My next game would require quite a lot of text and

• using default installed fonts doesn't look nice
• can't find Web font that suit my needs
• I need to use my own old school looking custom font
• Right now Mipey awesome SpriteFont plugin is no longer supported and last time i heard it's not working well with Cocoon.

So yeah, an easy to use Sprite Font, would be nice to have.