Construct2 for mobile phone development

[Serephim]

Iphone or Android

Anyone have any experience with this? Is it a viable thing or should one just stick to regular languages? I remember hearing about Construct 2 having iphone development support, but i'm looking for the limitations of using it.

[DimensionWarped]

Construct2 programming is basically a lot like MMF programming, so if you are comfortable with that I imagine it's perfectly viable. I've got a construct 2 license, but I still haven't really done anything of significance with it.

[Serephim]

Have any idea of how well the program works across platforms?

[DimensionWarped]

No I don't unfortunately. I only experimented with it using PC. However, I think the idea is that since it's HTML5 it's supposed to be fairly consistent across all platforms. Something like an IOS device might not implement all the functionality in HTML5 as Chrome does in Windows, but it's probably just be graphical stuff and I'm pretty sure I read on the blog that they had fallback stuff for all of the platforms that they support. You'd just have to give it a try really.

For some examples of what you can expect when operating on different platforms: https://www.scirra.com/blog/103/ie10-review-still-disappointing-for-html5-games

[OverbounD]

Never used this. I have used GM:S though. It's basically the same as regular GM but it has extra functions specific to devices and a runner for testing phone games on PC.

If you want to make something in construct that you plan on moving to a phone eventually consider making a cursor object that is always at the position of the mouse. The task of switching said object from tracking your mouse to tracking your finger would be pretty straight forward.

I'm moving this to R&D. Since this is about researching ways to make games.

[Serephim]

okay this is pretty neat. Scirra has designed Construct 2 with diverse porting in mind.

I feel pretty dumb for not jumping on the full version of Construct 2 when it was cheaper. I guess i'll start porting current my current Construct engine to Construct 2.

And shell out the $110 USD.

[Serephim]

Okay i've been getting the swing of Construct 2, and for the most part it's an improvement over Classic

except for the exclusion of the fucking debugger, which i do not think I will ever be able to complete anything without

[Candescence]

Okay i've been getting the swing of Construct 2, and for the most part it's an improvement over Classic

except for the exclusion of the fucking debugger, which i do not think I will ever be able to complete anything without

You can actually set up a manual debugger, just ask DW. I imagine they'll figure out how to create a built-in debugger eventually with HTML5, though Scirra has a pretty big to-do-list, though they've pretty much nearly got all the features from Classic implemented (if not all of them).

[Serephim]

I guess when more is ready i'll try to document my experience on using everything.

But at the moment, i'm using CocoonJS to transfer the app into native Android code, which has its issues i guess. Naturally, the framerate is the biggest issue, and i hear sound has its hurdles as well.

[Serephim]

By the way, i'm still actively playing around with Construct 2 and the CocoonJS wrapper with my android phone. I'll probably make a topic soon once i solidify the gameplay and make proper adjustments to the game to make the concept mobile phone ready.

The Construct2 + CocoonJS combo is...well, it's okay i guess, but there really isn't much you can do with it outside of really simple games. I can imagine porting the most basic Sonic Worlds engine with only core movement would probably start your development efforts off with about a -10 reduction in framerate. And that's a generous guess.

Unless you were going to be making some really simple platformers (and I mean modern klik-n-create simple, not SMB simple), then you might as well not look forward to the construct phone wrappers ATM.

[DimensionWarped]

Why do you need CocoonJS? I was heavily under the impression that most phones just sort of support HTML5 within their browsers these days.

[Serephim]

I guess I don't, but it exports the game into native android format, like any other app or something. Otherwise you'd have to run it from a browser.

Mainly the option of one of the stores.

[Candescence]

The main problem with porting to phones in general is that they're designed for 3D rendering, not 2D, meaning you have to do a considerable amount of work to keep a game's framerate at a steady 30fps. The CPU and GPU budgets for mobile games are absurdly small, especially for 2D games, where it's extremely easy to run into problems, and thus you have to keep a rather conservative memory budget on the visual side of things.

Now, the actual logic processing is another matter entirely - more often than not the game logic is much more efficient than the rendering, so generally it's not as much of a problem. A Sonic engine is a bit tricker to keep efficient, however - I've learned the hard way that Streak's engine is ridiculously un-optimized in C2. Creating a Sonic engine in C2 would likely have to be done completely from scratch, and by someone much more knowledgeable in that sort of thing than I am.