Site hung for me (us-east) on the first few tries. Get ready for the HN hug, Ashley!
I've never used any animation tools, and it's been on my list to make a few basic logo animations in css/js. It's striking how many features you guys have managed to ship in a webapp and I'll definitely play with Construct Animate in the near future.
Also want to say that the tutorial/walkthrough is excellent, and gave me a great impression of the core functionality in under a minute. Without the walkthrough, I might spend the same ~30 seconds being unenthused about the UI elements, which others have pointed out have a distinct mid-2000s appearance that I personally don't care for.
Tom here from Construct, spent a lot of time recently working on improving reliability/scalability of website so when I see comments like this always sends a pang of fear through me :)
Site resources looks to be coping just fine which is great (we often get upwards of 20 pageviews per second on our site at peak times) so will put this down as a blip.
Look forward to hearing more about how you get on with Animate, Ashley and Diego have done a stellar job in getting productivity software running in the browser!
Another nascent tool is Rive ( https://rive.app/ ). It claims to produce smaller output than Lottie ( https://lottiefiles.com/ ), which itself another animation container(?)—imagine .SWF for Flash.
Flash really got me hooked as a kid. It was easy enough to get started and had enough depth with their scripting language that got me to start to learn programming.
I still remember the demo flash animation to this day.
I wish more web products enabled a one kid show to get something done that wows adults.
Web dev today is a messy onion of poor abstractions that you need to know too much to get a little done.
Can you describe how it's different/better than something like svgator?
Also, i just went to create a new project: 2 things immediately were a problem
1. the modal didn't have differentiation between primary button color and secondary. I clicked cancel
2. after clicking create it took >30+ seconds and there was no indication that something was happening.
Surprised I hadn't heard of SVGator before, since I've posted about a lack of SVG native animation authoring tools in the past. Appears to have an option to use either CSS-based animations or JS-based (curious it appears to lack a native SMIL option which would offer various things the JS-based option supports and benefit most from authoring tools).
On topic: remarkably the Construct Animate editor/demo works even without cookies/web storage enabled. Nice :)
Agreed when you're in a crowded space the best thing you can do for potential new customers is to create a comparison table so that they can easily differentiate your product from the slew of other offerings. In this case feels like there are: motion canvas, adobe animate, svgator, etc.
This looks like a really nice tool. Would you consider a "Family" plan level of pricing? I have two children (12yrs and 15yrs) who love following Youtube animators and doing a large amount of art and animation themselves. The personal plan is too restrictive for them (layers being one major limit). Watermarks/logos in the final rendered content is fine as this is all non-commercial. I would have no problems supporting at ~$10 a month for something that fit a case like this. Thanks!
I'm reminded of a desktop app Google has called "Google Web Designer" which can do similar timeline based animations and exports to the same formats. But it's nice being able to do in the browser without downloading an app. However, Web Designer is free so there's that. Also, who knows how long Google will continue to support this app.
I cut my teeth as a programmer using Shockwave and Flash back in the day, so I'll always be happy to see that kind of IDE live on for others, even if I would no longer use it.
I used to love Flash as a kid. I just tried this out and ran into a few snags. I completed the mini tutorial which was pretty slick and clicked "Menu -> Preview" and it just showed the first frame of the animation (static pig). I was expecting a preview of the animation. I then attempted to export a gif and got a hard error. "Oops! Something went wrong." Standard MacBook 15" using Chrome/Ventura.
You need to change the 'Start on layout' property of the timeline to make sure it plays in preview. I think our guided tour should include that though, so I'll see about updating that.
Not sure why that error happened when exporting a GIF - I just tried it and it's working here (Chrome/Windows). Could you copy and paste the error message and send it to me at ashley@construct.net? I'll see if I can figure it out from that.
If I wanted to use one of those animations as overlay on a video I have (with transparency), what export would you recommend? Based on your intro video, is seems it would be a series of PNG, or is there some other option?
If your video editing tool can use an image sequence (e.g. 000.png, 001.png...), I'd recommend using the Image Sequence exporter[1]. If you want an actual video file with transparency, you can do that by using FFmpeg to encode a video from the image sequence, which we also have a guide for[2].
On the other hand, they're subscription only. It used to be better, back in Construct 2 days, sensible flexible pricing.
Then they changed it to browser based, subscription only, Chrome only. The whole thing becomes read-only the moment your credit card stops drip-feeding the subscription.
When you poke around in these tools on the weekend, the subscription model falls flat. Being billed for "time" that happens to fall between my use of these products, is a bizarre way to charge customers for software. I get that if I rented a lawnmower, I'm paying for every day I have that mower because other customers want that same mower.
Construct 3 and Construct Animate are not Chrome only, it works in all major browser and even mobile/tablet devices. Chromebook support has been a major plus for us in the educational market.
Construct 2 was pay once, but we found after a few years sales really plateaued. Going to SaaS was a difficult transition for us, but it's worked out well and we now see year on year growth which gives us a lot more breathing room.
I think it's important to also recognise that pay once software just doesn't work as a model for a lot of countries around the world. As an example, for Construct 3 we charge the equivalent of ~$12 USD per year in Malawi which makes it a very affordable option, whereas a one-off price would have to be roughly quadruple that for it to be economical for us, and would likely put it out of reach of a lot of people who otherwise may of paid annually for it.
SaaS puts more onus on us to cater for our current paying customers, before with pay once our focus was weighted on acquiring new customers. To what extent this actually plays out is kind of tricky to put your finger on especially from where I'm sitting but there is certainly an element of this in our work.
I'm not going to pretend that SaaS is suitable for everyone and every product and I understand why people are adverse, but for us it's worked well and a lot of noisy predictions from some of our customer base about this being our downfall never played out. The transition to pay once to SaaS was a vulnerable time for our business and a very interesting one at that.
You're implying "SaaS" means subscription only, and the opposite of SaaS is "pay once". But there's various pricing models available. Usage-based pricing for example. Feature-based, or a combo of different ways to structure the price. Maintenance plans is another way, where to get the latest version requires payment but otherwise it keeps working.
Pay once still works. You could have increased the price to $500 or something. It would then take 3+ years of subscription pricing to equal one pay-once amount. Many users would opt for subscription anyway in that case.
> noisy predictions from some of our customer base
When customers make noises about the pricing, you have the choice to stand your ground and fight the war on pricing. Or you could meet them half way. But you stuck to your guns, and so did I when I jumped ship back when the newly released Construct 3 was indeed Chrome only at the time. I never made noises on the forums about it because I was fairly new to Construct 2. I just left quietly.
Maintenance plans is something we considered, but though it wouldn't work well for us. This is because it's infinitely more difficult to maintain software when you have your customer base split into different versions, complete abandonment of lower version customers is a no go when bugs are discovered or a feature breaks due to technology change. This significantly impacts the complexity of our product deployment and maintenance. There's also other complexities around documentation, tutorials etc etc, the list goes on.
It could also reflect badly on us if customers on older versions are demoing the product to other potential users when they are many release cycles behind the latest version. There's a myriad of benefits of just having all customers on the same version. To go down the maintenance plan route for us would be a mistake.
Generally propositions from customers for different or more exotic pricing methods over what we've gone with tend to involve a lot more complexity to ultimately allow people to buy it for less. The model we've got is working well, and we don't see any advantage to changing it right now.
> I never made noises on the forums about it because I was fairly new to Construct 2. I just left quietly.
Which is fine, but we're a much more successful company than we ever were with Construct 2, largely because of the direction we went with pricing. We accept it's not for everyone. I think looking back over our history we've gone from Open Source to Pay Once to SaaS. When you go through these changes you're going to lose customers who were attracted to your original payment model, this is just a reality we have to accept.
Did construct three ever add the ability to explicitly set an "archetype" for a given object?
That was one of the most frustrating things about using construct 2. The archetype was effectively arbitrarily designated as the "first instance of that object on the first layout of the project", so if you spawned new instances they would be preassigned those settings. It was very non-obvious and led to people having to build helper functions that would spawn new instances with the desired default settings.
The windowing / panels / dropdowns / UI components look really nice. Like, almost a whole desktop program. I was just wondering what UI framework you were using. All in house, awesome.
[edit] Sorry, was the UI for the Construct actually built using Construct? Do you guys use PixiJS or anything like that as an underlying engine?
Thanks, we were aiming to make a desktop-grade UI in the browser and it's nice to hear feedback like that!
The UI was separately developed with JavaScript, it wasn't made in Construct itself (which is mostly canvas-based). The whole runtime is also in-house - we don't use PixiJS or any other libraries, once again it's all our own in-house engine, custom WebGL/WebGPU renderer, etc.
As others have mentioned, the workflow looks a lot like the old days of Flash, which I really miss. I’ll definitely be giving this a try for future projects.
It took a while to figure it out as you can create a SVG object but can't import a file and there's nothing matching "import" in the docs.
What a weird decision. Testing the software whether it would correctly work with my assets is probably the most important purpose of the trial version.
Awesome, thanks for the correction. I see how it works right now. For the lazy: right click on "Files" on the right, select import and import your file, double click canvas and create SVG object, then the imported SVG can be selected in a dropdown on the left.
motioncanvas seems like a nice open source alternative , although motioncanvas relies almost completely on JS to draw and animate https://motioncanvas.io/
I can't speak for everyone here, but I would imagine the majority of people creating Flash content back in the day were using some warez version. For me personally, I was a teenager and my parents had no idea what I was doing on the PC. I believe I started with Macromedia Flash 2 or 3. I just wanted to animate something on the screen for the same reason most of us started programming - that feeling of being able to instruct the computer to do something and see it come to life. I used Flash for a while and even got a small job in college creating a new Flash website. Even with all of those memories I have zero interest in Adobe Animate because animating things is not my career and I don't want yet another monthly subscription. I like that Construct Animate has a free plan, although the free tier seems too limited to be useful.
I've never used any animation tools, and it's been on my list to make a few basic logo animations in css/js. It's striking how many features you guys have managed to ship in a webapp and I'll definitely play with Construct Animate in the near future.
Also want to say that the tutorial/walkthrough is excellent, and gave me a great impression of the core functionality in under a minute. Without the walkthrough, I might spend the same ~30 seconds being unenthused about the UI elements, which others have pointed out have a distinct mid-2000s appearance that I personally don't care for.
Good job :)