I’m Rob and started using Construct 2 back in 2015. I got my start making chiptunes all the way back in 2009 and that eventually led me to Construct. I’ve made a bunch of game jam games and released a full game in 2017 called A Small Robot Story on Steam and Itch. Since then I’ve entered the games industry and now work as a Producer at Unknown Worlds.
I recently revisited a demo I made a while back and want to finish it up. I was disheartened to still be using Construct 2 which I love but isn’t supported anymore. I’m also not too keen on paying a subscription for software. I had heard of GDevelop way back in 2015 in my initial engine search but just revisited it and am incredibly impressed! I’ve spent the last week porting over my demo and it seems like things will work out fine. Really stoked to see all the community extension support; that’s just lovely.
I’ll definitely be floating around the forums some more and look forward to meeting everyone
Hey there it’s awesome to have you a part of the community and welcome! I am new to everything and just getting my feet wet in the game development world. The community is currently gearing up for a game Jam, it’ll be my first one ever, but the 4th big one by GDevelop from my understanding.
I can understand about your feelings on the subscription software. Anyways, hopefully we will get to see your finished up demo soon.
If you need any help, the tutorials and guided walk through really help to start to get the basics under control.
Seeing as your current company has made one of my favorite games in the last 5-ish years, I hope you find great success with GDevelop.
While I don’t see someone creating the next Subnautica with it (at least not anytime soon), there’s a ton of functionality for building out truly fantastic games in the 2D space.
Welcome and thanks for telling us about your background!
I hope you’ll like using GDevelop
There is always a bit of time to adapt to a new UI/UX, and we also have still a fair amount of progress to do there. So as you’re a “power user”, we would be interested in the GDevelop core team to have your candide feedback on what you struggled with/what’s good/what’s not so good/hard to use in the UI.
Not everything can be solved immediately or sometimes we take different approaches as other softwares, and we have a list of things to improve already, but always keen to see what your first feedback would be!
@4ian Here is my feedback! Preface: I’ve only been using GDevelop for a few weeks at this point, so there is definitely the possibility that my opinions will change.
WHAT I LIKE
UI: The UI looks great. Everything is easy to read and parse and you offer some nice themes. The UI is clean and modern and feels like quality software.
Events: So far I’ve had no issues with events. As I mentioned I’m porting a game from Construct 2 and 90% of the events port over at a 1:1 ratio.
Extensions and behaviors: It’s clear you place high-value on extensions and as you should! They quickly speed up the develop process and it’s an incredible feature that you can search and install them while in-engine. In my opinion this is a flagship feature of GDevelop.
WHAT I STRUGGLE WITH
Project Organization: My issue here is UX based. Scenes, variables, and objects are scattered throughout the engine; they all live in different places. This was well-handled in Construct 2 with their project window. Everything lived there and it made the workflow very efficient. Currently my workflow can slow down when I need to make a variable or find an object. I’m sure I will acclimate over time but it still halts my workflow.
Project Window from C2. This is how I prefer to organize and this is what I’m porting over.
Object Folders: I know you have Object Folders in your backlog and I’m happy to see that. I’m a visual person and having a long list of objects is anxiety-inducing. I’m also a Producer so I love any chance to organize
Need constraints: Along with project organization, I think my biggest feedback is it felt like you’ve given the users too much control. I could see you constraining where things are and corral the user in to using something like a “project window” for all of their assets, variables, scenes, etc.
Debugger: I need spend more time with it but the debugger seems very light. A quick and easy way to watch a variable work in real-time or watch and object count is very useful. Forgive me I just haven’t discovered that yet.
SUMMARY
So far I’m enjoying my time with GDevelop! I’ve got a simple loop going, tested my build, and have been digging through the community and have always found what I need. The strong value of extensions and behaviors is great to see; especially pushing community-developed ones.
Thanks again for looking for feedback and keep up the great work. This is a solid lil engine that I’m enjoying my time with
Thanks a lot for taking the time to write this down. Super useful.
Nice! Glad that you like extensions and behaviors. We still have a bit of work to make them more accessible, but extensions are a core part of the experience and we’ll push forward the (good quality, vetted) extensions even more in the future.
Totally understandable. We have in mind to rework entirely the project manager at some point so that it’s always visible, and has this “tree view”, which would allow for a faster organisation, and also create folders at any point in the hierarchy.
Even better, this would allow to move easily objects living in a scene into a folder, so that these objects are accessible to the scene inside this folder. In other words, the concept of “global” vs “scene” objects would just be now a matter of where objects are living in the tree… and same for events (or even… extensions).
This means that a scene would just be, by default when you add one, a “folder” composed of a list of objects, a set of instances (layout), an event sheet and a set of variables.
You want to make an object “global”? Just move it up in the tree. You want to make some “external events”? It’s just an event sheet that you can put in a folder and import somewhere else. You want to make an “external layout”? Just create a layout somewhere in another folder.
Anyway, all of this to say: I do agree and this is kind of on the roadmap but we need a lot of preparation to make it happen. Hopefully we can make it happen progressively.
This being said, to speed up your workflow, I encourage you to try the “command palette” (Cmd/Ctrl+P by default), which would hopefully allow you to navigate faster using the keyboard.
Agree too. It’s on our roadmap since… ages now.
It requires a bit of work but it’s almost part of the overall effort to go toward a project tree. We’re trying to find something that works well on the UI/UX side both on desktop and mobile.
I kind of see your points. Notably for variables where we allow users to make mistakes too easily.
It’s very barebone yes. We should probably add a watcher view directly inside the game.
So far I’m quite happy this feedback is aligned with what we’ve observed and are thinking about.
A few of these requires quite a bit of work so it’s unlikely we can address all of this (we also have plans for the whole ecosystem, the asset store, more online services for games…). Hopefully this will be also helpful for any contributor passing by wanting to help on one of these topics
