You could always try the HTML5 game engine, Construct 2.

It will give you similar results as what can be done in flash, but is encoded in HTML5, which quite a few folks are pushing to become web standard.

Also it has a free license and a pretty damn cheap indie license. From my experience, it's pretty versatile. My team is using it for one of our a side-scroller projects right now and plan on using it for a point-and-click adventure soon.

But if your heart set on flash, I would suggest getting your hands on a student copy of Adobe Flash Professional CS4 or better and forget about FlashBuilder. My manager at my day job tried to get me to use it, but to me it just felt like a messy GUI to place and test assets that you've already built in Pro, so I kinda hate it.

Hope that helped and good luck!

The fact that the website says "no programming required" is troubling: does that mean I can't do any javascript programming in it?

In Construct 2 you create your game by adding "behaviours" to objects. Behaviours provide... well... certain behaviours to objects, and often have a number of options you can configure. There are also plug-ins that add functionality such as keyboard/mouse/game-pad/touch input, etc. or run perform some logic such as path-finding or performing a calculation.

You then add the rest of your game logic by expressing programming logic via an "expression" system, which essentially is programming but is done through a visual system rather than by typing code. There is however no way of working with code such as the "GML" provided by Game Maker. However...

How "customizable" is Construct 2

There's a relatively simple JavaScript API to add your own plug-ins and behaviours to Construct 2, and all of the default ones were built with the same API and can be examined as a reference. There's also an active, small but growing community of users who have already created a large number of plug-ins that are available for use. It's quite easy to customise and add functionality where required.

If you wanted to do so, you could even encode all of your game logic as a plug-in rather than using behaviours and the event system, although that would largely defeat the point of choosing Construct 2.

I am quite interested in hooking it up to my NodeJS server. Would that be possible?

Absolutely. It would involve coding a plug-in for the client-side, and of course implementing whatever you needed on the server side. A number of users have already experimented with various approaches to multi-player games, but I'm not sure if there's anything ready-to-use. If you're otherwise happy with the engine and editor I'd say it would make a good choice for implementing a multi-player game by coding a communication plug-in.


The free version is quite capable, so if it's something that interests you I'd highly recommend at least taking some time to give it a try; I was very satisfied and purchased an early-adopters licence, and there have been numerous additions and improvements made since then. The major downside for now is performance, but it's been improving in leaps and bounds and is quite good as long as you keep in mind the limitations of HTML5/JavaScript -- particularly when exporting to mobile devices.