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Tom Gullen from Scirra talks about Construct 2 – an amazing easy to use visual engine, which can help you to build amazing games.
80.lv starts a series of interviews with the companies, providing some information about some of the game engine out there, which could serve as an alternative for Unity, UE4, Cryengine and Stingray. In the first part of (hopefully) long series we’ve talked to Tom Gullen from Scirra. This is the company behind Construct 2 – an amazing easy to use visual engine, which can help you to build amazing games.
Introduction
We’re Scirra, and we create the product Construct 2 which is a game engine that allows you to make games – no programming required.
It was founded by Ashley and me (we’re brothers!). Ever since we were young, we both enjoyed trying to make our own computer games. Ashley initially worked on an open source project Construct Classic. He decided later to write Construct 2 from the ground up on his own, and invited me to join him in establishing it as a company. Time flies, and 4 years later Construct 2 is a very robust and strong product with thousands and thousands of users!
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We’re based in London, and are currently growing taking on more employees who are really doing a brilliant job at helping us move forwards quickly!
Construct 2
The biggest feature of Construct 2 is that no programming is required to make amazing games. This is what differentiates us from other engines. It allows for rapid prototyping of ideas and mechanics, and is a great tool for people who are new to game development to jump in and make a game.
When you might have to spend hours before you get anything moving on screen with coding, in Construct 2 you can get something moving about in minutes!
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Games
There’s a couple of note! First of all you might of seen Red Carpet Rampage in the news recently, it went viral and was played a LOT in a short space of time! Secondly, The Next Penelope is an amazing showcase of what you can achieve in Construct 2 technically, it’s a stunning (and very fun!) game.
2D or 3D
Impossible to say really! As Construct 2 is an exclusively 2D game engine we don’t really look into 3D that often. We do get asked if we’d ever introduce 3D capability into Construct 2, but that’s not our focus. We want to deliver the best 2D game engine, other engines do 3D really well!
Developer’s Expectations
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I think it depends on the user. Artists and designers who typically would have to team up with a programmer to make a game now can make games on their own, so from their point of view they’d want to focus more on the gameplay and content of the game rather than the code. Some users love to code and would never use anything otherwise, and in-between the two there’s a whole spectrum of different needs!
Community
We’re fast approaching 250,000 registered users! It’s growing fast! We know we’ve been drifting a little apart from our community recently as we’ve been so busy expanding, but we’re hoping to address this soon if we can.