Construct to Unity conversion

Getting Started
1

Hi All,

/Incoming wall of text…/

I really don’t know where to ask this question because it embodies my entire game project. As a beginner developer, I’ve spent the last 4 years or so learning Construct 2 (an HTML5 webview display-based engine) because I felt Unity was too hard for a novice like me to learn in 2011, and then again in 2015, and 2018. It’s like every time I dip my toe in the Unity pool, it’s too hot.

So I put a 2D Music Career Simulation game on the market with Construct 2, and had been building and publishing via Intel XDK – until that shut down for indie developers. Then I tried to move the build service over to Cocoon.io – until that shut down as well. Then I tried to use Adobe PhoneGap, but couldn’t properly integrate all the plugins I was using which resulted in major bugs being released in my latest build dated about a year ago.

So I’ve been losing (hemorrhaging) fans, review stars, and actual revenue because of this difficulty in trying to make sure my game had features like Achievements, IAP, Google Play Games for Android, Game Center for iOS, Google Analytics (which was then sunset in favor of Firebase, which doesn’t integrate well into Construct 2 or 3). I just recently hired a contractor to try to ‘port’ my game from Construct to Unity, but this contractor did not have any prior experience with Construct, so all I could do is show them the game in market for them to study, and provide notes (none of which were as detailed as the complex work I put into the game over 4+ years).

Receiving the final delivery from the contractor, I can see how unprepared, sloppy, and lacking in skill they were, especially now since I’ve been taking a Udemy course (the Complete C# Unity Game Developer 2D course) while checking in them about the design and game logic of the game, and waiting for their final delivery. I lost a lot of money on that project, and now I feel they’ve built a game that is worse than what I built in Construct 2, as well as the fact that I can’t really build upon it because they’ve left a bunch of generic game objects, no reasonable file system, and have a very unorganized plethora of scripts that don’t even use the conventions I’ve been learning from the Udemy course.

So is there any hope? I’m really struggling with how complex I’ve made my game vs. how much Unity I know to duplicate/replicate that complexity in this porting over process. I really wish I just had somebody that could spend the time with me to comb through it all, but … I don’t even know what I’m asking for. Just wanted to put the feelers out for hope and truly contextual solutions. For those interested, the game is Rap Quest 2.

Thanks for reading this, I’m super crestfallen at the moment and have been trying not to just belt out cries for help because some responses I’ve gotten elsewhere were very condescending or aloof.

  • Craig
2

Very sorry to hear that. Both learning Unity yourself from scratch and then porting it over yourself will be a pretty large undertaking. Just looking at a youtube video of your game, it looks a bit complex for what someone brand new to Unity should expect to tackle. If you wanted to go that route, I’d probably continue to maintain the game on Construct, and work on Rap Quest 3 to eventually replace it in Unity.

Plan some additional features worthy of a new version of the game, and give yourself enough time to do it right yourself. Being Rap Quest 3 it doesn’t need to look identical to what you already have either. Replicating a game built with another engine in some ways is harder than just doing a good reimagining of it, since you don’t need to replicate every little detail and can take advantage of what Unity can do better while skipping what Construct might do better instead of brute forcing it to be the same.

My 2 cents at least. Good luck!

1 Like
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Much appreciated, Joe. I’ve flip-flopped between switching to Unity and just thugging it out with Construct 3 (which I half-built the 2.0.0 version with) for like 3 years. I did have the thought today that I’d go back to Construct, but man, I really want to get on more of an industry standard so that I can start to look for professional work in this space while I work on my game – hopefully having a bullpen of devs I could glean from along the way.

But you’re right. I know enough with Construct to make it work, I just have to solve for the vital plugins (like a crucial database plugin, and Google Analytics/Firebase) that I couldn’t carry over from Construct 2 since they’ve sunset support for that (and the plugin developers didn’t make compatible versions for the newer version of Construct).

Would love some more replies if anybody else has a different opinion out there!

1 Like