Leaving C2 for awhile. My opinions and thoughts.

Hi ErekT

Indeed, this might be the case.

Now that I think about it, I own FLStudio as a simple beat making tool, exaclty because of their "free lifetime upgrades" policy.

But then, there are so many other options here - like having more paid versions. I mean, it's probably possible to calculate - e.g wait a year from now to get the modularity for free, or pay extra $ (not big, I would hope) and get the functionality in 3 or 5 months.

Look at how Unity does this - they have a very capable free version, and are moving modules from the paid to the free version (like mobile deployment), but there is, if I recall correctly 100+ team behind the development.

Or, let me rephrase the question: is it possible to turn C2 into a more mainstream tool just by getting more "serious" users/teams of users to make games with it, or maybe this requires changes on both ends of the stick? ;-)

Cheers,

Greg

If C2 had an "Extensions Store" then it would happen automatically via simple capitalism. Just like with FLStudio you can go buy a VST plugin (or download a free one) right now correct? That would add an all new synth sound or drum compression or whatever right? Well that required a software developer to make that... and FLStudio didn't have to pay them anything. The VST plugin system allows developers to make money selling them so developers on their own make them.

You can make plugins right now for C2, but there is no marketplace to make it easy to buy/sell and know that the items in the store has been vetted by Scirra to be of a certain level of quality.

I have seen some plugins from the RexRainbow plugin / behavior developer I would have paid money for... how many developers would be building things for C2 if they knew there was potential money to be made? And that library of high quality items would attract more game makers willing to spend money because they are intending to make money.

Scirra can sell their base product super cheap for the hobby game builders like they do today AND make money from a store for people who are wanting to go beyond the hobby phase.

For the "more programmers" question, Scirra has been looking for one more dev to hire in UK for more than 6 months now, and last I heard they still hadn't found someone that would fit the job/requisites.

About Scirra Careers link at the bottom of your screen

For the "change the license fee", the question already rose several times in the past and every time Scirra responded by telling they had no plan on changing their policy on that point.

And I still think it's a smart move putting them far above their competition on that specific aspect, C2 is so cheap it's almost a steal.

For the "serious users", C2 is almost 3 years old, we should start to see some of those "serious projects" pop up during 2014.

For the store/assets/plugins, it's in their bags as well and has been discussed in the past too.

One improvement will come from the new arcade that should support third-part plugins/behaviors and should have some "linkage" with the store as well.

Kyatric answered all the questions pretty well.

Personally I don't like subscription fee's. I dropped MMO's for Guild Wars 2 and won't go back. I especially don't like subscription fee's for tools. I won't ever pay Unity's subscription model. But that's me. I'm sure some will be fine by it. The idea of a smaller more bite sized price is easier to swallow. But I'm the opposite I like to examine the long term costs and if I can pay a higher now price to not pay more later I will. If I don't have a choice then I just won't.

I've been heralding the extension/asset store integrated into IDE for a while now. I'm the stance that it will jump the quality, developers and popularity for all of C2. Until then It's mostly a small game toolkit. Though I agree that some developers will prove that C2 has merit. Unity was the same way for a while. Unity needed a couple of solid games before the toolset was deemed viable for full comercial production. C2 will get there.

cirra can sell their base product super cheap for the hobby game builders like they do today AND make money from a store for people who are wanting to go beyond the hobby phase.

That would be grand! I hope to see something like this soon.

About the possible fee structure changes idea I mentioned - I do love the "one fee for a lifetime" solution, and I admit it was one of key factors for me to choose C2 in the first place. And it seems to be gaining popularity with other products (see e.g. UltraEdit, recently introduced "lifetime upgrades license"). It was just an example. My point was simply that the tool should grow on both ends (end users and tool developers), and *if* this requires some license fee restructuring, then maybe it's worth to pay the price ;-)

I wasn't aware that Scirra was already trying to get extra devs to join the team, it it's a great news to me! And I understand how difficult it can be to find an approriate person.

I don't blame you for leaving. The moderators are making me question my commercial purchase as well.

Hopefully the mods don't have anything against bumping a thread a year old, but I got an email about a Construct 2 update the other day (yes, I still update C2 even if I don't use it) so I decided to check out how things have changed in a year.

I'm quite impressed. I believe Scirra has taken a lot of good steps toward increasing community engagement through their online store. Here's what I would like to see site-wise:

• Better store listing. Right now it defaults to best-selling, which tends to favor items with flashier icon/image. It should default to average customer review, but the algorithm should also take into account the number of reviews given. I'm not sure if it does that already, but if it doesn't then one review that is 5 stars would be enough to bump up the item to the top.
• Split the 'How Do I...?' forum into subforums or make a 'How Do I...?' category with forums separated by topic. The 'How Do I...?' forum has always been a discombobulated mess of people bumping their posts to the top because everything is under one roof. Some people are more knowledgeable in some topics than in others, and it hurts both the topic creator and the possible helper by centralizing everything in one place. Not to mention the bumping issue I touched on earlier.

For the developers themselves or possibly a very proficient C2 developer hired by Scirra:

• Project tutorials. Right now we have .capx examples, but those aren't really tutorials. While it's easy to argue that C2 is very beginner-friendly, developing a project from start to finish involves a lot of learning that goes beyond the simple C2 UI and messing around with things. Take a look at the Unity tutorial page (http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules) and you'll see the same topics separated by category that C2 has, except at the top there are Projects that take a new user from zero experience to a completed game. People learn differently - some prefer the mass of topics and tutorials that teach specific parts, while others want to just dive into a tutorial that creates a game from scratch, uses best practices, and teaches neat tips or tricks. Pardon me if some of these tutorials exist already, but if they do then the tutorial section of the site needs to be reworked to include an easy link to these near the top.

What I'd like to see from the community:

• Less platformer templates/games with source on the asset store and more 'modules' that pertain to other genres (an example would be a shooter sprite with basic events controller for movement + shooting). Don't get me wrong - competition is great, and there are a few platformer templates on there that seem really good (I haven't tried any so I cannot verify they are actually good), but what I'd like to see is one or two de facta 'best' platformer templates instead of the 'here to make a quick buck' ones that plague the store at the moment. This might be an exaggeration, but that's my takeaway from things.

Honestly, I haven't used C2 for about 2 years now and don't have plans to return. But I love C2 and will always be watching how the product and community evolves, so hopefully Scirra takes my suggestions into consideration. One thing I really like is the multiplayer server addition they added - it seems to be very unique since C2 is primarily an event-based engine that doesn't require a programming language. I've never seen a multiplayer system in a non-coding engine, so I wonder about how optimized the multiplayer server can be, but I think this is a good start. Perhaps in the future we'll have server variants on the store for purchase and tinkering, such as a real-time optimized version and a turn-based optimized version. Obviously this is just a face-value evaluation of the system based on a light skim of the multiplayer description, but hopefully Scirra has some better ideas in mind on how to expand on this.