Hi everybody
My name is ego and I had some experience with C2.
I’m so happy that I found a free and open-source version of that engine that have cool devs 
I’m posting this bc I want to take G-Develope a little more seriously.
hope we become good friends
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Welcome to te GD community, I hope you enjoy developing games.
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Welcome to the community and have fun with Gdevelop.
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Welcome here Ego!
Can you say to us what games you already have made with Construct 2?
When you’ll know well GDevelop (perhaps is it the case today but i don’t know), could you show us what are the differences (advantages and cons.) of the 2 games engines, etc.?
I think it is always interessant to know that.
Thanks and again welcome.
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I can tell one or two, Tilemaps, Canvas
Construct 2 is superior to GDevelop in almost all possible ways. It is almost 2 times faster, got better compatibility with cordova and mobile devices, got better support with 3rd party API’s and tools like Steam, Google Play, Ad providers, Spriter…etc, got better extension system with a proper API that allow you to create your own extensions without need to understand how the core engine works, the API do all the heavy lifting for you, got better documentation, better everything.
The only con is that it is very expensive because Scirra want to force people to Construct 3 and if I remember from next year C2 will be deprecated.
If you would like to know, Construct 3 is even better than Construct 2 with an even faster engine, even better support with 3rd party API"s and can also script in JS directly in C3 using an easy API that make it feel just like a scripting language without need to understand how any of the low level staff works.
The only con of C3 is that it is require an annual subscription and it is runs in the browser only, but can run offline too, feels just like a native desktop app. Scirra did a really great job but many people can’t afford the annual subscription fee, so people certainly going to use words like “hate it, trash…etc” but the truth is, it is the best HTML5 engine out there currently exist.
GDevelop is a nice beginner friendly engine overall, it has a lot to offer for free but can not compete with commercial engines. The biggest problem is that and always been, GDevelop is a hobby project with no clear road map, no goals, no plans and all user feedback is ignored. Yes the Trello board is filled with ideas, suggestions but it is totally ignored, nobody really care what is on the board and for many years I never seen any dev or contributor asking for user feedback regarding how something supposed to be working or what to implement next. GDevelop is basically a playground for JS developers, everybody is playing around with ideas but nobody seriously seek or listening to any user feedback.
Of course if GDevelop already got everything you need then it is certainly a holy grail, completely free, open no strings attached, actively developed, but in case there is anything you missing, don’t expect anyone to care. You need to be ready to get your hands dirty and do it your self, but at least you can do it your self thanks for being open so it is a pro/con depends on how you look at it. If you are not interested in developing your own engine in JavaScript, it is certainly a con. But even if you are interested but you don’t know C++, you may going to hit obstacles because the core of GD is written in C++ and you may need to include some header files at minimum to compile when you implement any low level staff and it is only getting worse as 4ian is looking in to using TypeScript, Rust and WebAssembly for certain parts of the engine, again GDevelop is just a playground for developers. This is the biggest con imo.
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Thanks Ddabrahim even if i think you are a little hard with GDevelop!
I have tested Construct2 a few 3-4 years ago trying to do a Mastermind with pretty graphics : i remember that C2 was a little difficult to apprehend for me (i used before Multimedia Fusion 2 and even before Game Maker 7) and GDevelop seems to me much more easy to learn and more important more convenient to use to make rapidly a game.
But these are far away thinkings and i can make an error of judgment saying all that.
Thanks again.
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Yes, this is true, one of the biggest advantage of GDevelop especially for beginners is that it is extremely forgiving and flexible and allow you to combine any condition and any action and if you do something wrong it is usually doesn’t break or crash because GD always fall back to default value 0 which is a valid value at all times. While othe engines may apply restrictions on what instructions and values you can use in what order, including Construct if you did something wrong, it may crash the game or the compile fail with an error message which can be scary for beginners. This is why GDevelop is fun for beginners and has a huge potential, but it is remain only a potential for many years exactly because what I have mentioned about GD is just a playground there is no serious roadmap, plans and goals just devs playing around with random ideas.
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Yes of course but if it was that which demarks GDevelop of many others games engines and in particulary commercial games engines : it evolves slowly but gives some changements you’ll never see with an engine developed by a team of professional developers in where developer managers want money and profit before all.
Thanks.
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GDevelop is evolve pretty fast actually but in a direction that nobody asked for. I guess it is something you need to experience once you get to the point you really need something to be added in order to complete a project or make your life easier and realise it is not about evolving slowly but nobody care what is it that you need…
The nice thing about it however, they do listen to what is it that you would pay money for and they provide support when you need it.
I guess it is comes down to the question if you are willing to pay money to get what you need or you prefer to get it free even if it takes 10x longer or forever. I know most people is here for the “free” part of GD, I was too once but I got to the point a rather pay than wait, unfortunately however 4ian doesn’t need money, he is a software engineer at Google, he can most likely buy a Tesla from 1 month pay check, so he doesn’t care for a few bucks he is just having fun which is nice, but it is no longer serve me. But I can speak only for my self but everyone going to get to this point sooner or later.
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IMO you are a bit exaggerating but your point is valid. User feedback is not ignored but it takes way more time than necessary. From my point of view, 4ian is working hard on making this engine more professional and optimized, while other contributors are adding mainly features a bit randomly and don’t add much user requested features. I, for example, only added internal changes (like documentation and stuff) that doesn’t help the end user or made extensions (which are also important for making the engine more complete, integrated with other services and attractive, but not as important as having the base software itself work flawlessly). The only real issue from another user I remember working on is keeping the filename between project creation tabs. I think saying it is a playground for developers may be a bit overexagerated but not that far from the truth, and this has to change. I think one of those things when you freeze all features and work only on bugs, and also do that but with user feedback. Another good thing would be to have another “serious” (like 4ian) developer as contributor that could help improve the engine faster.
I think the main issue is that it is growing slowly like amigo said, as in my PoV 4ian is the only one to work seriously on it and other contributors are the one making it “grow in a direction nobody has asked for” by adding what they are up to.
You also need to keep in mind we are doing this in our spare time, and most of us contributors work on what is fun to us, which is not always what users ask for. Some features are also just very very hard to solve, even if they may look basic (else event, folders for objects, solving the blurry text issues in the top of my mind).
There was once, Victor but I think he was also ignored by 4ian, he was a C++ dev and worked really hard on GD but 4ian decided to drop the C++ engine. I have never seen Victor since.
This is not what I meant really. Here is some specifics because I think we already take this conversation way off from what my intention was. I am talking about 4ian mostly, not the contributors.
4ian added pause scene, nobody asked for it, I made some suggestions, requests, I was ignored.
4ian added platformer behavior nobody asked for it, I made suggestions, I was ignored
4ian added inventory, nobody asked for it, I made suggestions, I was ignored
4ian dropped C++ code base, people was not happy, he did not care (Victor was in the middle of a pretty cool new event editor and Android port he was more active than 4ian and 4ian just dropped everything he done, I guess this is why Victor never shown up since)
4ian bring us new IDE, nobody asked for it, made tons of suggestions none of them made it in to the new IDE
4ian bring us custom behaviors, nobody asked for it, I did make suggestions, 4ian did not care
Contributors did bring us awesome features, I made suggestions to 4ian who was simply point at the contributors he was not interested.
Requested tons of features, not a single one made it in to GD.
In 7 years, not a single feature was added to GD that I have requested, it is not simply slow development. It is ignorance and the bottom line is, it is the biggest con of GD. 4ian is a really nice guy but he doesn’t care because he is not in need of anything we have to offer. Most free and open-source projects rely on donations and funding and so devs are listening because they want the money. 4ian doesn’t want the money which you might think, oh cool, but no it is not cool because it is make him ignorant about everything we have to say. If you add a cool feature he is not going to say no, but try to convince him to change something he made…good luck with that. 
I understand what you’re saying.
I stopped looking at the roadmap to see what’s coming.
I keep it up to date, but I see it as a ideas box.
Personally I can’t do much with my skills, so my ideas come out of nowhere and pop in the roadmap.
I actually do what I think I can do on my own.
Even the “simple” thing of putting folders for scene and object lists is not simple at all for me, I do what I can.
Welcome to the community. Hope to see some awesome games from you in the future 
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Hi all.
Going through @ddabrahim comments on @4ian’s development decisions I couldn’t help it but thinking that GDevelop is, I’m afraid, doomed to fail. This is a very common scenario on opensource projects that are managed by the same person that started the project in the first place and doesn’t care about feedback from both contributing developers and users.
I’m curious to see what @4ian has to say about all these.
Hey all, I see some strong feelings in this thread. First, I understand that’s it’s frustrating that feedback/suggestions are not making their way to the final product that GDevelop is. But please understand that I do care about feedbacks. I read them all, try to put them in the roadmap - which is huge because that’s the destiny of a product like GDevelop: it’s too big to have everything done, and contributors and myself would need 96 hours a day to address everything!
I’m doing my best with the little time I have for GDevelop, and I value a lot contributors that are helping GDevelop on GitHub because they are helping to push the app forward much more than what I could do alone.
Of course, everything is at the end a matter of priority. If I don’t implement this super new fancy text flipping feature, it’s because I’ve spent my last two evenings fixing bugs that were reported and bugs are always a priority against new features. No one wants an engine full of bugs 
The issue is that everyone will always have different priorities - something that is utterly important for someone will be the last thing to do for someone else.
The reason I made the roadmap was actually because of a feedback of you @ddabrahim, because you were frustrated at the lack of visibility and the answers to feature requests.
Turns out that the issue of lack of visibility is still there and I’m sorry for this. It’s indeed a failure. As an open-source project, it’s hard to define a clear roadmap (which will frustate 95% of users anyway), priorities can change very quickly.
Maybe I should rename the roadmap to ideas box?
But it’s also the wonderful thing of open-source. Someone requests something, a contributor do it, and here you go, it’s in the next version of GDevelop
I identified that “hot reloading” of games is something that could change the landscape of game creation, so I made it into GDevelop for an upcoming version: https://twitter.com/GDevelopApp/status/1277715685272100864
Of course, it’s not always simple. Remember that software development is basically slow and difficult. If you work in a startup or a big group, everyone will always complain that the software development is too slow and bug ridden. As I said, fixing a bug can be taking between 5min and 5 days depending on the bug - hence why I’m spending a lot of time reviewing the dozens of Pull Requests that are on GitHub, to avoid future bugs.
Software development is also not always simple. There is no good choice. You’re doing everything in C++? People complain they can’t contribute. You’re doing everything in JavaScript? People complain you’ve closed the door to native engines, that “HTML5 is trash” and so on.
The real picture is that it’s more complicated and that every choice is a careful choice between portability, performance, maintainability.
And still, at the end, I’m very proud that we have an engine that works on the web, that can be downloaded, that is fast enough for a lot of games, that is having ground breaking features like behaviors using events or hot-reload/live preview soon, that has 2 students from Google Summer of Code creating new features, that has 5 to 10 contributors doing changes at every version. It’s maybe not a lot, but it’s growing
I know that these explanations won’t convince everyone or won’t change things. Just tried to explain things because I also have feelings and I felt that you were a bit hard at me while everything I’ve done since 10 years is trying to make GDevelop the best thing to create games Don’t assume bad intents for me, on the contrary!
The result might not be as good as everyone can hope, but I’m still very confident GDevelop is getting at the level of other engines, faster than one could expect for an open-source project, and that the future is bright for GDevelop.
I’ll see if I can clarify stuff in the coming months to show how GDevelop is going to be supported in the future. Hint: it’s not going to disappear anytime soon
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Hello 4ian.
I would like to thank you for sharing your view on this matter. GDevelop has a great potential and it would be a shame to loose this great piece of software.
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I just saw the gif tweet of the live preview, and oh boy what an awesome feature!
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I am sorry for 4ian that this post which is originaly a new user presentation, evolved of this manner!
And also it’s of my fault: i had never wanted this deviance of the original post.
I’ll terminate my post saying that after all, the most important thing or advantage of GDevelop is that it permits to do good and great games in an most easy manner possible. I know that GOOD and GREAT are some words a little subjective which must be better defined and precised because after all, what are the definition of great games today? 3D games, multiplayers games, etc. : it is not sure that it is only that. Before all, some games with great gameplay and also many players who like a lot to play with them.
Again i regret that the conversation was turned against 4ian by my fault.
Sorry!
lmao what a welcome thread xD
@ddabrahim I kinda agree. construct may be better in some ways (or maybe not)
but I live in a US sanctioned country and don’t have access to paypal and cc to buy anything in dollars!
so i have to either use cracked versions or free softwares or pay with bitcoin! and I’m sick of using cracked version of C2 and feel a little guilty, so I managed to stop using that even tho i’m so good with that.
that’s one of reasons I wanna use GD tbh… beside that I’m kinda falling in love with GD engine because of it’s simplicity
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