Scirra Blog

We use a visual programming system in our startup's game development tool Construct 2 [1]. We may not be Visual Basic big (yet!) but we're running a successful business on a visual programming IDE with lots of users who love it! [1] https://www.scirra.com

Worth mentioning is the default pricing settings on Steam create vastly different prices geographically. We manually set out prices to match our store (https://www.scirra.com, sorry can't help myself!). Bit of a PITA as we have to keep it updated regularly for volatile currencies, but we'd rather people buy from us directly. Geo pricing difference is significant, so depending on per country volume actual revenues may be minus a significant figure if those numbers are based on USD.

A lot of people are recommending Scratch, but I am going to recommend Construct 2. It is an awesome engine for making HTML5 games. It is visual coding so your nephew will have no problem with it. https://www.scirra.com/ Of course, listen to what pvaldes said also. Designing a game first will be better. Also, I would recommend Teamviewer for you guys to use so he can share his screen and you can interact with it.

My first recommendation would be http://scratch.mit.edu/ There are a number of commercial projects, including http://www.stencyl.com/ , http://www.scirra.com/ , and http://www.yoyogames.com/ that are a bit more sophisticated, but Scratch is great for kids.

This isn't directly related to the blog post as it's about stuff available on OS X, but if you're on Windows I can very much recommend checking out Construct 2 by Scirra[1]. They have a pretty fantastic HTML5 game engine and an editor (and the whole "no programming required" is really just marketing - even though it uses a "visual" event system you still need to understand programming concepts like loops, conditions and such in order to make effective use of it). They have a feature-limited (no other limits though) free edition available for it too. [1] http://scirra.com

Hi there! It's great to see someone so young who is getting into game design. We have some software called Construct 2 which is aimed at non programmers and as a time saving device, you can see it at http://www.scirra.com (a quick video of how it works at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RlSmkSbleI). You and your son might really enjoy using it! (Also exports to HTML5 games) I'm not aware of us having any users as young as 4 years old, but we would love to hear if he enjoys using it and can make games in it! I'm happy to give you a free license for it in return for some feedback if you want, don't worry if not :) Just send me an email if you want it. Tom

Seeing as you listed Game Maker there, I would throw in a recommendation for Construct 2 by Scirra: https://scirra.com They have an excellent 2D HTML5 game engine and a very nice IDE to go with it. The event programming system they use is at least powerful as Game Maker's GML (if not more so) and you can also write your own plugins with JavaScript. Out of three mentioned programs, C2 is definitely my favorite for a couple reasons: - It's built from ground up with 2D development in mind. Unity in comparison is primarily for 3D development, and while its 2D tools have improved over the years the difference is still really obvious. - The overall user interface design of C2 is actually from this decade and makes good use of big screens of today. In comparison, you can still very much see the relatively ancient roots in Game Maker's UI when programs were designed with 640x480 screens in mind, not to mention how tons of features added over the years have just been slapped haphazardly into wherever there was room in the UI at the time. Game Maker's drag & drop coding is also just terrible, it's really either GML or go home with it. - Pricing. You don't have to pay any extra for additional exporters or such with C2. Of course, there is the caveat of having to pay extra attention to mobile performance with C2 games being HTML5-powered on everything it exports to, but on actual computers you can cover the Windows/OSX/Linux combo very nicely. Now, I mostly do game development as a…

Construct[0]. I used to sneer at such tools, considering them "not real gamedev". That was until, on one local edition of Global Game Jam, a designer in our team did in Construct in 15 minutes what took three of us coders a couple hours. This drove home the point that we were really overcomplicating things by coding a simple game from scratch (in XNA, back then). -- [0] - https://www.scirra.com/construct2 is the one I played with, but they also seem to have a web version now, for better or worse, which is available at https://www.scirra.com/

Try your hand at Game programming, its great to mix things up and the communities are great: Unreal Engine 4: https://www.unrealengine.com Maybe a mod for Unreal Tournament or Ark Survival: https://www.unrealtournament.com/blog/ http://www.polygon.com/2015/8/14/9153379/ark-survival-evolved-hunger-g… Unity: http://unity3d.com/ Construct2: https://www.scirra.com/

I would try this: https://www.scirra.com/ It is more visual than programming. I would also work very hard on improving your ability to find answers online because if you evolve past the visual interfaces it's a very important skill for programming.

C'mon! No one here read the sourcecode? It's made without any programming using this app: https://www.scirra.com/ ... still more games than i have done though :-P

I highly recommend Construct 2: http://www.scirra.com/construct2 It takes care of most of the heavy lifting when developing games for HTML5, but it still has a very open and powerful scripting language (unlike something like gamesalad which is more like using pre-built blocks). Edit - Ha, beaten by 1 minute.

This is a bit ridiculous to be honest. I'm 15 and don't consider myself a programming, in fact I would say I can't program at all. But me and a friend "wrote"(well, we modified a few examples we found online and using a lot of pre-written code) a few Android apps one or two years ago. It was far away from this advanced thing as a game, but I don't really think it's a huge thing just because he's 14. Also, there is tools[1] these days that do most stuff for you. Using them I would probably been able to ship apps and games back when I got into these stuff. I don't want to ship products though, well not anymore, I want to write good code. [1] https://www.scirra.com/ http://andromo.com/

Content is king in SEO. you seem to have lot of activity in /forums. But it doesnt seem to be great quality content. Your blog (http://www.scirra.com/blog/archive) has very small number of posts. I would recommend writing keyword targetted content in your blogs (use the free Google Keyword tool to get an idea abt high demand keywords in your domain).

I think Construct is similar: https://www.scirra.com/

Construct is suitable for that. https://www.scirra.com/

>Is having to learn a game engine going to be faster than starting from the ground up? Yes, pretty much by definition, since a game engine saves you the time of writing an engine. ;) Unity[0] and Game Maker[1] both come with tutorials which will show you how to build a basic game quickly. Game Maker uses its own properietary scripting language called GML, and Unity lets you do scripting in Javascript, C++, and Boo, which is basically Python. Also, attempts are being made to integrate Clojure support in Unity as well[2] On the other hand, if you like actually writing the code, there's a good chance there's a low-level framework (like SDL[3] for C++) which will let you code, but still take care of some of the hassle of cross-platform support and graphics. I've only played around* with SDL and C++ but there are quite a few tutorials for it. Also worth mentioning is Construct2[4], a game engine for html5/js. It is possible to do 3d rendering in javascript/html5[5], but as far as I know, only Chrome supports it well. Last I checked you have to change the config settings in firefox to allow opengl rendering to work and I just assume IE doesn't support it by default. If you want to work with 3D and want to get something done then Unity might be a good idea, although of course you're going to need good models, etc. Game Maker supports 3d but it's primarily for 2d. [0] http://unity3d.com/ [1] https://www.yoyogames.com/studio [2]…

clickable: http://www.scirra.com

> My big hangup is understanding a low level use case for it. Two real world use cases for WebAssembly are image decoding and audio decoding. WebP image decoding: https://webmproject.github.io/libwebp-demo/webp_wasm/index.html Opus audio decoding: https://www.scirra.com/blog/211/opus-audio-in-construct-3

Unfortunately, I don't think it's fair to call Edge evergreen. Updates to Edge come via OS updates, which can be quite a hassle and many corporate environments might not perform at a regular basis. This article goes into more depth: https://www.scirra.com/blog/173/just-how-evergreen-is-microsoft-edge

Thanks, this post is also very useful to me as a hobbist working on a FLOSS game (RPG) construction engine. I hadn't heard of Cordova or of the ability to run Win 10 universal apps on XBox One and web apps on Wii U. Sounds like it might be a good idea to port from native desktop to HTML5/JS using emscripten, and then port that to these non-desktop platforms. Was there much work involved in porting to XBone or Wii U? In [1] you wrote It's not clear whether this UWP app support is actually intended for games publishing, whether game UWP apps will be accepted for the Xbox, or if you're meant to use some other publishing option. Do you know any more about that now? [1] https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/26/run-your-construct-2-games-as-xb…

I really like https://www.scirra.com/construct2 for having fun and fast prototype iterations. Just be aware, that it is UI and click heavy, but yet powerful and flexible. I think it will be hard to manage large code bases in Construct, but that is something I have not yet gotten into with my simple hobby projects.

Control-F "asm.js", found nothing, Control-F "emscripten", found nothing, closed window. Dude, JavaScript is the new assembler. Forget about JavaScript. It's irrelevant. Cat's out of the bag, IE+Safari are going to have to step up, and when that happens, it's game over. I, for one, welcome our new compiler overlords. https://www.scirra.com/blog/132/more-about-asmjs-powered-physics

https://www.scirra.com/construct2 - not seen that before, thanks for the tip. Edit: looks like it's Windows only. Will try with WINE. Edit2: Pretty buggy on WINE over Kubuntu 14.04 - crashes when trying to start project from template or when run layout on empty project.

I've been using Scirra's Construct 2 (http://www.scirra.com/construct2) and like it so far. I do programming for my day job but I like how this abstracts things that I need to do to make a game like tying art assets to game rules so I can focus on the game design and less time on learning lots of subsystems. Curious to hear about other game engines as well.

ah, I was mistaken there. What about this: http://www.scirra.com/arcade

First thing I'll say is that I really don't like the idea of using Flash, HTML5 etc any web technology for making games. However I see the need for it. I'd like to get more information though how your game engine makes it easier to create faster/prettier games. I am a fan of Construct2 (http://www.scirra.com/construct2). They make it really easy to create HTML5 games (it is all point and click, no programming required). What differentiates your technology from the many existing ones on the market now? Before the negative/hate comments star pouring in, maybe the OP/founders can give us an insight and some more information on what their plans are.

I wonder whether your huge[1] runtime had any effect on the benchmarks. Wouldn't using pure Javascript have been a better idea? I also notice your "C++" version used Direct3D. Shouldn't you have used OpenGL with the exact same calls as the JS to get a fair comparison with the WebGL versions? [1] http://www.scirra.com/labs/perftest-2d/c2runtime.js

Shameless plug: my HTML5 Game Engine http://impactjs.com/ is a perfect fit for games like these. This particular game seems to be made with Construct2 ( http://www.scirra.com/construct2 ) though - which is a bit more "point-and-clicky" than Impact.

Games made with Construct 2 From the Demo page: Space Blaster Game http://www.scirra.com/demos/space-blaster/index.html Ghost Shooter http://www.scirra.com/demos/ghost-shooter/index.html Works awesome in Chrome 13.0.x Impressive!