Hi all - and first of all, thanks to Scirra for the awesome Construct 2, and also thanks for all you guys for contributing to the forum.
I started programming Pascal and assembler back in the old DOS-days. Remember DOS? 256 colors with the standard IBM driver? But my 'puter had 1 MB graphics card, which meant I could run 16-bit (65.536) colors. And so I made my own special DOS-driver, which enabled me to utilize this vastly larger color space - WHILE still being in DOS-mode (no cheating using Windows 3.11 stuff).
As time went by, I jumped on the wagon of developing J2ME games (java to micro edition); midlet 1, 1.1 and 2. I remember this as being much, much easier than dealing with stupid Pascal.
Then my attention turned more towards making graphics and music, and as more years passed by, I decided to make my games with ActionScript in Flash. As I wanted my games to work on the smartphones which were available back then (those were pre-iPhone days, so in my area, this meant Windows Mobile phones; primarily from HTC), I had to use AS 2. No fancy AS 3 for me...
As HTML 5 and its canvas element, and most importantly WebGL showed up, I became very intrigued. I'm a web programmer, dealing primarily with PHP/MySQL for backend and xHTML 1.1 (strict) and HTML 5 for frontend. Naturally, getting an HTML 5 framework to do future games with, seemed like a good option.
As I own an iPhone and iPad nowadays, I also want the games to be as cross-platform as possible.
And so, I googled, and I found... Phaser. Built upon the extremely fast PIXI.js-engine, Phaser seemed like the best choise. I decided to make a "Flappy Birds" clone, and did so in less than 4 hours. This may not sound that impressive, but I'm primarily a graphics artist, and I also had to read some £$! documentation to use Phaser. The next day, I ran into a world of problems... semi-transparency (8-bit alpha in PNGs) doesn't work properly. Neither does collission detection on pixel level. And worst of all; "resize to fit browser window" cannot be done either. Well, there're workarounds for each of these problems, but if the framework doesn't do these things out of the box, it's a very bad sign in my opinion.
Having read about Construct 2 and lots of other stuff, I decided to give Construct 2 a spin. First of all, because I've read about the connection with the primary competitor (Game Maker) and the pros and cons of each, but also because of the great reviews from non-programmers and programmers alike - especially reviews from mid-2013 and onwards.
My experience with Construct 2 so far, has been so overwhelmingly positive, that even though I probably should've kept using the Free version for a few days more, I decided to buy the Personal License today.
So - two days ago, I downloaded the Free License - and began working on a remake of my Flappy Birds clone that I'd already done in Phaser. I didn't have any time yesterday to work at home, so this little pet project has taken about 10 hours in total. This includes learning and a lot of googling, some trial and error, testing on PC/iPhone/iPad and performance optimization.
I'm extremely impressed at how easy and how WELL it all works - far, far better than anything I'd dared hoped for.