Suggestion! Consider bringing Cordova into Construct 2/3!

The store used to have plugins for sale in it, but it promptly filled up with plugins costing £40 or more IIRC. I was very worried this would create the perception with new users that they would have to end up paying double or even triple the price of a personal license to get the features they wanted. We thought about having a price cap, but then that undervalues ambitious plugins like Q3D. So it got put on the backburner, and like many things on the backburner, quickly got replaced by more urgent matters. We could consider it again, but then if it's full of expensive plugins which the developers are claiming are must-have essentials in their sales pitch, I don't think that would come across very positively to new arrivals. As it stands it's up to third-party developers to distribute plugins themselves and charge for them independently, and it's up to them to announce updates, communicate with users, etc.

ah ok i never saw this (or noticed) but yea I can understand the concern about price steepness but let's be honest right. the market can dictate this. if the mobile market told us anything it was a race to the bottom. many of these plugins are not actually that difficult to make really IF you have the knowhow. So if 2-3 people make IAP plugins.. with a user star system and prices / sales I don't think that's a problem

Also you might consider with your fears of price gouging to support officially the most critical things developers need (like IAP). I don't think you need to add many, in fact I'd even say IAP is the only one you should consider making official. I'd love to see more, but I know your time is limited.

I mean look at Q3D.. it's "open market" and it's like $35.. if people don't want to pay, then the devs won't make money.. if someone sees a price that's too high.. and sees the audience looking for a cheaper solution.. they can take it upon themselves to offer a better priced alternative.. and if the alternative is better / or worse.. a star system would allow them to be kept honest and help the community reward the best plugins

i'll tell you right now I'd gladly pay $100 for a professional plugin that works! What sucks is paying $10 for one that sometimes works.. or would work if i knew some little trick.. but because the dev isn't full time on the product doesn't get back to me for a week or two.. not their fault really.. not enough money in it to be that available..

new arrivals should just be concerned about making games.. if they enjoy the game enough and spend months making some marvelous product they should realize that a $100 (or whatever amount) for saving the many hours / skill sets it would take to figure out some free / cheap alternative AND knowing that the dev is there to offer support for their product it's fine.

It would cost me much more to hire a single developer to go make a plugin for me.. say $50 an hour.. 2 hours to make a plugin for construct 2? probably an engine they don't know already.. could cost twice that.. maybe more.. and new developers who see a feature they want.. and really understand the value should be ok paying the price.. I know some new users might be students or kids without a lot of money, but they need to realize this is the real world.. developers need to eat.. Unity has better prices (and sometimes much more) for theirs but they have a user base of millions of devs, but some of those plugin devs make their living on the asset store.. no reason C3 developers couldn't or shouldn't do the same..

Ashley, C2 itself is a super bargain.. like i said.. many GameSalad users pay $300 a year for a pro license.. i had a license for about 2 years I think.. of pro.. $600.. and honestly i didn't mind because i was very productive then.. but i stopped because they are too sandboxish.. they had their own IPA / APK service too mind you.. which was nice.. but yea i'm glad i got away from that.. but it was a good learning experience and taught me things that i could bring to Construct 2.

But the catch with plugs is you can't demo them in the editor.

Then speaking of editors, no one's going to want to develop for C2 when C3's in dev.

And we have no idea what C3 will bring, or change.

If C3 adds the ability to make your own plugs somehow, then the whole concept of a plugin market will change.

C3 (as I read it) is basically C2 updated.. it's not some radical departure from how C2 works. We have been told that Capx files will open in C3.. there may be some things that change (consider how webstorage was compared to localstorage plugin, a significant change, but necessary move)

As for plugins yep.. you can't in Unity3D either. If I ask $500 for a plugin.. or $5.. it's up to the C3 user to choose if it's worth it. a star rating system will help. Plugin developers will ask themselves if it's worth their time to make a plugin for $3.. and have to sell 300 to make what I deem worthwhile for me time... because I had to spend a week figuring out all the challenges of a given service / conversion. Are there 300 C2/3 users who will even want my plugin? I don't know.. however, I'd love to make $10000 for my plugin too so i can spend more time answering users with problems (if there are any) knowing good reviews and happy customers will drive more sales..

C2 gives you the ability to make your own plugins.. C3 will likely be no different. It's basically .js files with some editing done to expose certain parameters to the editor to act on the plugin's code. Also earlier I said plugins are easy.. this is a bit oversimplified.. some are very easy.. others can be very involved.

C3 is not going to allow non coders to "make plugins".. that's the whole point of a plugin is to connect C2 (non coding) users to bodies of javascript that call on larger solutions like revenue generation that don't care if you're using C2 or Unity or Unreal.. they are just a service.

you gotta yourself as a game developer.. would you rather pay a little more and know you're giving a developer enough value to care to support you or would you rather pay $3 for a plugin and wait weeks to hear back from them? I'd rather see developers get paid for their time... and be there for me if I need them so I can spend less time pulling my hair out because something is wrong and no one will reply. If someone charges a premium for a plugin then skips town.. nothing can stop that from happening but ratings will suffer and people will warn each other..

However I get the feeling from the interactions I've had with the C2 community that it's a good group of people and I believe that the players we've seen making fine plugins so far are going to be continuing to do their good work. Frosty Elk's Parse plugin was great and I did get email support from them when we had issues with it AND our testing found a bug which helped them improve the plugin for everyone. I paid $9 i think for that and it was a great value, but I feel they could charge more and have the time / incentive to do more with it / help people.

I've never heard any developers say how much they have made off any plugins, but I imagine the money they made was modest. how many people really are using parse with C2? We want too so we bought the plugin. I haven't tried Cranberry Parse yet, but I have it because I paid I think $35 to have full access to all of the plugins which is insane value, however that value becomes less when you realize the developer (understandably) doesn't have time to support every issue because there isn't enough money coming in to justify the time it takes to support every issue that comes along.

"C3 is not going to allow non coders to "make plugins".. that's the whole point of a plugin is to connect C2 (non coding) users to bodies of javascript that call on larger solutions like revenue generation that don't care if you're using C2 or Unity or Unreal.. they are just a service."

There's no reason for them not to make it so the users can create their own plugs using the sdk via eventing, other than the extra work involved.

It would be a huge selling point.

newt there is no way you're going to be able to make plugins that interface 3rd party Javascript through events/actions without having to get into the code and do some actual scripting. There is an Javascript SDK that lets javascript coders create C2 plugins to access the various files needed to integrate another API.

I don't see that as a selling point. People want to make games, not API/SDK plugins. What does matter is that a solutions can be found. My business partner is a seasoned javascript developer and in matter of a few hours had a working C2 plugin. Tim over at Ouya managed the same thing having never used C2 to any extent before diving into it. It's not difficult.

Our plan is to create a plugin for the store if/when it's integrated. I'm not sure which one we'll do but C3 will be ripe for good easy access solutions. We'll likely use it ourselves for our next game and then sell our solution(s) to the community to help them with their games.

Sorry, I can't take your word for that. Unless you can show why that won't work.

We are, after all, using events to manipulate javascript.

Granted it would take some time for someone to dig in some third party code to figure out how to call the necessary expressions, but this isn't just about using libraries.

We need reusable events.

We need the ability to loose the chains of those third party libs.

newt someone else will have to explain then i guess. no one is getting C2 to learn how to use it to access javascript code.. people who want to do that are javascript developers, not most construct 2 users. what you're really suggesting is some kind of macro / prefab system.. not plugins. plugins are really for accessing libraries.. it really is. be it vibrate.. or social sharing... or tweens.. or any number of other plugins out there.. they allow custom or pre-made / open source html5 code become something C2 users can call on and bring into their game.

Yes I'm talking about behaviors too. You can make any kind of behavior with events already, but the lack of reusability makes that less fruitful.

There could be thousands of quality plugs with mechanics still unexplored.

Sure the third party solutions are valuable, but api's come and go. Just like javascript developers.

Edit:

There could be thousands of quality plugs to sell on the store with mechanics still unexplored.

it's an interesting idea for internally stuff, but i don't see it being practical or easy to implement for external source files. I also don't really see what would be useful in a modular sense that wouldn't require some revision.

What are you eager to reuse? high score system? controls? with a little knowhow you can reuse code from other projects without much trouble. I've done it before and it worked fine.

If someone is that interested in DIY they should just learn javascript and use the Construct SDK Ashley has already made.

If someone was that interested in coding wouldn't they just move on to another engine?

Its really hard to tell that to a customer that just paid for a license, because a selling point was "no code".

Then telling them to just go buy a plug third party plug that can't be guaranteed is another lead balloon.

Developers don't need poorly implemented leaderboards api's, or dodgey ad networks, they need access to collision polygons, image points, the inner workings of Canvas and Webgl.

It's actually the other way round: Diego is working on C3 with me, but I still do maintenance on C2 so it's not left behind.

Thanks for clearing that up. Seems like I was misinformed.

"C3 is not going to allow non coders to "make plugins".. that's the whole point of a plugin is to connect C2 (non coding) users to bodies of javascript that call on larger solutions like revenue generation that don't care if you're using C2 or Unity or Unreal.. they are just a service."

There's no reason for them not to make it so the users can create their own plugs using the sdk via eventing, other than the extra work involved.

It would be a huge selling point.

This is one of the main things I'm hoping C3 will achieve.

If someone was that interested in coding wouldn't they just move on to another engine?

Its really hard to tell that to a customer that just paid for a license, because a selling point was "no code".

There are developers who can and want to code, but they still stay with C2 because the engine fits their needs and the event system provides rapid development.

I agree it's bad that C2 doesn't have IAP support out of the box*. There is no sugar coating that.. Really most of the gripes probably would be resolved by just having C2 expand it's core plugins that should be considered part of the service. At the very least. Our other suggestions would introduce more work one way or another.

If you asked the average developer what services a modern mobile game would need and it would be:

• ads
• interstitials
• IAP
• rewarded video

IAP and Rewarded Video are the main ones that are entirely absent. I use the cranberry Admob just because I know it works, but I hear the native one does as well with mobile/cordova, I'm just not messing with a working plugin for now.

I do see what you mean about C3 internal plugins being a possibility. Could be interesting.

*Update. I'm told by Ashley that it does support IAP but I will tell you every attempt I've ever made to get it to work has failed. I use cranberry's IAP because I've been able to make an IAP work with it fully without weird error messages that don't seem to happen when I use the cranberry plugin. So in my mind I don't feel C2 works out of the box with C2 because it's never worked for me. I just tried since it had been awhile and I still don't find it working like it should.

The store used to have plugins for sale in it, but it promptly filled up with plugins costing £40 or more IIRC. I was very worried this would create the perception with new users that they would have to end up paying double or even triple the price of a personal license to get the features they wanted

I understand what you are trying to say here regarding high prices, but the flip side is people like me bought C2 thinking I could easily publish to mobile with monetization and social media sharing features included. My thought is if the good plugins that work cost $x, then that is the market. I would think it is better to let people know what it might take financially to get what they want then to leave them feeling frustrated....as some of us are now.

Leaving the plugin developers on the outside leaves us games developers unsure of which path to take. As an example, try to imagine what a developer thinks when he sees people talking about cranberry's facebook plugin or his admob plugin. My thought was "Why is there something being offered outside C2 that C2 offers out of the box?".

Again, I love C2 and I am plugging away to make it work, but part12studios suggestion that we have a clean, well-defined path to mobile (with monetization) that we know works would be great.

As we can see most people want a number of things that are missing from the out-of-the-box C2

If C3 can incorporate all that (ads, in-app...) and use 3rd party open source tech to generate apks and ipas (you can then resign an ipa in xcode using command line tools), then C3 would be a big sell-out success!