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So, Overbound basically asked me to make this thread, and I decided, eh, sure, why not. I suppose a comparison thread between 2D game maker programs would be good. I haven't used Game Maker or MMF2 in ages, so I think this'll first post will mostly be me talking about how awesome Construct 2 is (it does need the attention, since it's somewhat more obscure than the other two due to not being around nearly as long), but I'll try and give my thoughts on GM and MMF2 from what I remember. Construct 2 The original Construct was created by a very small team of people (under the name 'Scirra') who used to work on MMF2 addons, who became dissatisfied with MMF2's limitations and decided to make their own program. Incidentally, I hear this was more or less treated as a 'betrayal' by Clickteam, who apparently still hate Scirra's guts. Anyhow, the original Construct was an awesome and promising program, but its foundations were rather unstable. So, Scirra started over with a much more solid foundation, and took something of a gamble - the original Construct used DirectX, but Construct 2's initial export option was HTML5. Yeah, that got a lot of WTF reactions back then. But Construct 2 has greatly matured as a program, much like HTML5 itself (especially with the adoption of WebGL), which is rapidly catching up to Flash (and Javascript interpreters today are much, much faster than Actionscript), and C2 is capable of exporting to a whole bunch of platforms with no additional cost. And C2 is rapidly updating, usually at on a weekly schedule. Let's get this out of the way, first - there is a desktop executable export option. It's multiplatform, in fact, using Node-Webkit, and it supports all the latest features of Google Chrome (in other words, usually pretty much ahead of everything else or equal with Firefox), and usually faster than a browser. The layout editor is very much MMF2 in style, but easier to understand and more flexible, with an in-built parallax system. And it has long aped GM's sole advantage over other game makers by implementing a tilemap feature that's compatible with Tiled. Oh, and C2 can import layouts from GM, too. You can zoom in and out, show parallax settings in the editor, use a custom-sized grid (which can snap objects to it), change the Z-order of various objects, and so on. You can basically have any number of layers, each with their own settings, including parallax, opacity, effects, scale, background colour, and so on. C2 has dozens of 'objects', from regular sprites, to tiled backgrounds (an extremely efficiently-rendered object that tiles a single texture along its size), tilemaps (they act like any other object), particles, 9-patch, sprite-font, etc. There's also more global objects, such as input objects (mouse, keyboard, touch, gamepad, etc), AJAX, audio, arrays, XML, and so on. Like MMF2, C2 has in-built behaviors, ranging from movement types (platform, 8-direction, car, custom movement, rotate, sine, etc), physics, turret behavior, pathfinding, line-of-sight, wrap, fade, flashing, solids, jump-thru, and other cool stuff. With WebGL, you can apply any number of different types of effects to an object, and there's a lot of built-in effects. And, in javascript, people can make their own plugins - objects, behaviors and effects, such as the Spriter and Magicam plugins. The event-based system is inspired by MMF2, but it's built more like the logic of actual code. C2's event system has sub-events, loops, FOR loops, ELSE, OR, functions, object picking, groups and comments, among other things, while staying fairly readable, and individual events, conditions, actions and groups can be disabled. Construct 2 uses event sheets independent of layouts - layouts can have their own event sheets, but any event sheet can be used with any number of layouts, using an 'include' system, like actual coding. Basically, with your core gameplay events, for example, you can modify some events, and the changes will affect all the layouts that the event sheet is included in. Objects can have any number of variables. Seriously, no variable limits. They can be numbers, text, or boolean. Construct 2 uses 'families', which are basically the equivalent of object-oriented programming. Families share stuff like variables, behaviors and effects, and families can be referenced as a whole in events (for example, shooting an object in the 'enemy' family merely requires an event for just enemies, not individual events for every enemy). Objects can also have 'containers', which can be used to spawn multiple objects simultaneously - when an object with a container is spawned, everything in that container is spawned along with it, and the same goes for when that object is destroyed. Containers also can enable picking instances in an instance of a container group. Performance-wise, javascript does have its limits, but it's a rather optimized engine. I've heard GM and MMF2 aren't terribly optimized either, so, yeah. Not everyone will get great performance due to certain GPU drivers being a bitch, but as long as you have the latest graphics card drivers, it's fine, more often than not. Positional audio is supported. Yeah, that's a thing, not all browsers support it, but it's there. Unfortunately, as for audio formats, if you want to support Internet Explorer and Safari, you'll need to also have sound files in AAC format as well as OGG, which is rather dumb. Collisions are polygon-based, which is something of a necessary limit, but per-pixel collisions aren't exactly that much better anyway. On the bright side, you can display collision polygons in the layout editor, which is cool. There are also 'collision cells', which massively optimize collision checks (so only objects within an object's collision cell are checked), though you have to have collision events as top-level events in order to use collision cells. There is a full set of debugging features, including a debugger, break-points, and so on. The price for the standard edition is about the same as MMF2. But unlike GM or MMF2, you don't need to pay anything for additional export options - you can export everywhere right out of the box. Did I mention online multiplayer is going to be implemented over the next set of updates? Yeah. that's gonna be a thing. Construct 2 isn't perfect, but aside from some minor plugins and maybe performance, it's pretty much better than its predecessor in every way, and much, much more stable. I loved Construct Classic, but holy shit it could be a buggy piece of shit. Construct 2 is well worth the asking price, not bad for a program whose development team basically consists of one dude and his brother from Britain. Construct 2 doesn't have a Sonic engine yet, though (not for a lack of trying, it's just that the main attempt at doing so turned out to be incredibly inefficient, event-wise, and the way it's built makes it unable to take advantage of features such as collision cells), but hopefully that will change in the future, I've pretty much given up on trying, hence why I'm focusing on non-Sonic stuff for now, myself. Game Maker Okay, my thoughts on game maker (don't really need to elaborate on features, since it and MMF2 have been around for ages and widely-used) - it's not very good. The various design decisions are frankly, incredibly strange, the level editor is rather limited in what it can do last I checked, the built-in event system is garbage, and you need scripting to get anything done, which is not necessarily a bad thing for people who actually want to learn to code, but for people who don't want to deal with programming, that's kinda bullshit. Multimedia Fusion 2 I consider MMF2 to be Construct 2's older cousin for multiple reasons, but what turned me off from MMF2 was its event system. Holy shit, compared to Construct's, it's almost incomprehensible for anyone who hasn't looked at it before. Granted, that might be slight hyperbole, but trying to study Sonic Worlds' events and figure out what exactly everything did and how the logic worked was just painful. Oh, and there's no 'include' feature for large groups of events, as far as I know, which a huge deal. I imagine other people will have different tastes, however, so, yeah. What do you guys think?