Ummmm... where is everybody?

I'm a professional game designer who likes to make casual games in his spare time. Although I can code a little bit, it's definitely not a strength, so I turn to visual tools like Fusion, Gamemaker and Construct 2. After reading *glowing* reviews of C2 over the last few years I finally purchased a copy and I'm very impressed with it.

The community here has been great so far but it seems like most of the posts and tutorials I see are from several years ago. When I looked the other day I saw several hundred people browsing the Fusion forums, and only 30 or so in the Scirra forums. Was there once a larger community of developers out there? (Or has the community always been a bit on the small side?) If it used to be bigger was there a mass exodus at some point, or did people just gradually drift away? If the former, what caused people to leave? And where did most of them go?

Just curious.

NOTE: After working on my first Construct 2 app for the past week, here are my initial thoughts:

1. I love the UI. It feels slick and modern. Simple to use and a lot more straightforward than Clickteam's antiquated UI. 2. The graphics editor doesn't have many features. I use dedicated tools for this, so it's not really an issue, but I was a little surprised. 3. I keep accidentally "unhooking" the Programs/Layers/Bookmarks tabs. Then I struggle to get them set up again. Is there a way to lock them? 4. Using C2 is more... complicated... than I expected. With subevents, functions, and other features, and with the way the Event Editor is laid out, it's a bit more like *actual* coding than Fusion. Maybe I just need to spend more time with it. 5. I am struggling a bit with the Event Editor. It's not always intuitive where and how to create subevents, add variables, etc. When I'm writing C or VBA code I sometimes add a blank line to separate one concept from another, but when I try to do that here I get a dialogue box asking me to choose a condition. Probably just need to spend more time with it. 6. My app needs an array, and I have to save data locally. I found the descriptions and tutorials about this VERY confusing, but it turned out to be fairly simple. (Maybe I'm doing something wrong.) 7. With Fusion I frequently ran into problems that I could NEVER understand. Eventually, I'd just try different approaches until I finally got it to work. So far I haven't had that problem with C2. 8. Love, love, love, the debugger. Being able to see the contents of my array, as I tried to manipulate it, was a lifesaver.

Need to get back to work on my app. If I think of anything else I'll add it. (Or I'll start a new thread.)

In my opinion the scirra store has reduced the number of file sharing and new tutorials, people are selling their stuff now.

But still its generally a helpful and pleasant community.

It varies considerably over time.

C2 is so easy - IMO - that most users just 'get on with it', with no need to use the forums. If/when they do, there is generally enough users who are willing to help, which is what counts, I think.

As the moderator said C2 it's easy to use... an example of that is that my 7 year old son just start making a platform game all by himself. Me as a father always look for stuff that they can learn, and I never thought that he will enjoy playing around with Construct 2, and also making a game. For me I just came sometimes read some posts, might look for something that help me in my project,( kind of hard stuff to do that I have been stuck for while). but for the other hand as I said before I think Construct 2 its very easy to use, learn and understand.

I'm not sure where you got the impression there's nobody around from - the forum typically gets 200-300 posts a day, and a similar number of new registrations. Right now there are over 200 users online according to the forum software, including 63 registered users. Our forum is set to display active users from the past 10 minutes only - some other forums use a much longer period, perhaps to make their forum look busier than it really is. Also our overall website traffic is pretty much the highest it's ever been. So I'd say it's busier than ever!

Good to know, Ashley! It's possible that I was looking at a subforum when I saw that there were only about 30 people online. Sorry about that. (I don't want people to see my thread title and get the wrong idea, so feel free to delete this thread!)

This is by far the most busiest forum I have visited regarding a game development tool. And the good thing is, most posts are about creating games.

Heck, this place is so busy, that even I post stuff on the forums, whether is helping someone with a question about C2, or just to congratulate someone for their awesome job. And trust me, I never post on forums, but C2