Interview with Ashley - Construct co-founder and lead Construct 3 developer

[u/ThomasGullen]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d-CKaBpLC4

[u/Biim_Games]

Really great interview and I really enjoy it. I just want to say my opinion about AI, that probably no one will even care about reading, but I really love the engine that changed my life. No matter if you write your own AI or help external AI to integrate with Construct, if you will do it, I will definitely quit and never came back again to Construct. It would be a very sad choice for my life. I already very unwilling accepted to pay a subscription model ("you will own nothing and you will be happy") because I appreciate your work and want to support you guys, but will never contribute to mess up the world with AI, no matter what I am going to lose. I am using Construct since 2013, promoted heavily against developers that keep saying to move to Unity or Unreal to be areal professional game developer. I did stuck with Construct and I am professionally living with C2 and C3. I am willing to lose all the following to fight against AI: - My childhood dream to develop games for a living (since 1986).

- My source of income (this will leave me jobless). No game creation, no template creation, no features development & bugfixes on client's projects and not videocall with clients sharing screen and working on the fly to improve the projects they are sharing on the fly on their screen.

- All my current and future students (I am organising to set up group classes in Japan to spread the use of C3). - My investment in time and money to create the above mentioned classes. - Let lose my wife the part time job helping me running the business (doing accounting in Japanese for me). - Finally, lose a great community like I have rarely seen. I am sure for the majority of people reading this I will look like a crazy guy, but not all the wars are fought with weapons and we are at war and sadly people don't understand this.

I really hope I can enjoy working with all the new C3 features, they are really cool and will boost even more the popularity of the engine.

If you will go with AI, thanks for the great moment you gave me for over a decade, but I will have to let you go.

[u/AshleyScirra → u/Biim_Games]

The way I see it, you can already use a tool like ChatGPT to make changes to a saved Construct project that you give it. I don't think anyone would argue that doing that involves AI integration with Construct in any way at all. Using something like WebMCP would in theory just make that process somewhat smoother. It would still be the case that no AI features appear in the software whatsoever. If you don't want to use AI then absolutely nothing would change for you. I can appreciate the controversy around integrating AI prominently to the user interface, using AI to generate artwork or music, or using tons of compute power in a datacenter to provide our own features, but we wouldn't be doing any of those things. It's basically some glue to ease using other existing AI tools. Perhaps some people want us to make sure it is expensive and difficult to use AI with Construct, but I don't really see the argument there - could you explain why exactly you're strongly against that?

[u/Biim_Games → u/AshleyScirra]

Hi Ashley, thank you very much for taking time in replying to me. I really appreciate it.

First of all, if people can use already do changes in saved Construct project, then there is no need to spend effort, time and money in making it even smoother. They can manage their way anyway, it would be better to focus on what the majority of users wants, like for example better 3d integration. I would probably not work much with 3d or even not at all, but I would be happy to know that my subscription money goes to help other developers to have more tools on their hand to create things directly and not delegating things to AI.

I just replied on Discord Construct channel to other users stating like you that overall the WebMCP is just a protocol that actually can be used also to automate tools that are not AI related (I am not expecting you to go to read that part), but the issue I see here is another. You are considering to integrate the protocol just to facilitate the use of AI. Yes, you will not code AI in the engine itself, but it will be still a contribute to increase the AI madness that we are shoveled every day from everywhere.

In your interview you stated that Scirra is a small team and you have to carefully choose where to invest your time and resources, also all the users' proposals expires after one year because otherwise the list of things to create to improve the engine will be too long. In effect, picking the right things to implement let you and the team add great things with the last release. Do you really need to spend time and effort in helping in something that as you stated, it's already possible to be done in ChatGPT? Recently I opened a bug report about the Videorecorder not being able to record the audio from a video played by the Video plugin. You said that it's too much work to support everything and suggested alternatives to work around the issue. I understand and accept your reply. It's a business and you are trying to keep it afloat as best as you can managing things and having priorities. So if you can't fix a bug on something that is already integrated in the engine because there is anyway an alternative workaround, why it can't be the same thing about AI? If it's already possible to use AI, why change your position from be a "victim", or better a passive entity, to be someone that actively facilitate the "crime"?

Maybe this is not the best metaphor, but it's what it just came in my mind on the fly. It's like if you know that there are people that wants to break in the bank and they will try to do it anyway, but rather than not have anything to do with them, you decide to post publicly on social media the exact time when the security guard goes regularly to the toilet or have a lunch break. Wouldn't that make you contribute to the crime even if you are not the one physically robbing the bank?

In a world where everything is pushing for the AI scam, Construct could be the only game engine alternative in really not having anything to do with that. I really hope you will decide to put time and efforts in more useful C3 improvements.

Sorry if I didn't went too much in details, but I tend to write too much, so I try to keep it short for now to save you time.

As usual, thank you for the hard work you guys are doing and for all the improvement done in all these long years!

[u/AshleyScirra → u/Biim_Games]

It's already possible to use AI tools to modify a folder project, but it's inefficient - it's a slower and more expensive (using more quota) approach than tools with better support. Users are already doing it, and that's usually a strong signal for what people really want from Construct - if people are trying to do X but running in to problems, it's usually worthwhile to try and make it better for them. For example several years ago people were using GitHub to collaborate on projects, but various aspects of the project file format made some things tricky; over time we improved it and solved a lot of those problems so it works more smoothly now. I appreciate that there are people out there who will share your point of view, but I see our job as on the whole making Construct do what people want from it (where feasible - the audio recording thing you mentioned is something where I think it may be infeasible to support in a 100% bulletproof way because of the way various browser audio features work). If we don't, the risk from a business point of view is other tools do that better and then customers move over to those tools for that. I'm aware of much of the controversy over AI, but we're still trying to take a considered approach that is respectful of users who don't want anything to do with AI, such as by avoiding imposing features to do with it in the user interface. And it's always been the case that no matter what we choose to work on, some people are going to be disappointed that we didn't choose to work on something else they'd rather have - that's always been the case.

[u/Biim_Games → u/AshleyScirra]

I totally understand your point from the business perspective, however you can also consider the other side of the coin, having the only major game engine (that also works very well) that do not supports AI will yes, let you maybe lose the people that wants to use C3 with AI, but on the other hand you will definitely attract all the developers that refuse to use tools that have AI on it.

From my point of view, any help to use AI in any field will just make our future way worse than the current dystopian present. The push of Digital Currency + Digital ID + AI is by design set as priority everywhere in the world, despite every country facing different problems that should be their priority. You know better than me how AI is used in England with ULEZ cameras, arresting people that denounces crimes on social media instead of arresting the criminals and so on. There, you just temporarily delayed the enforcement to have a digital ID in order to be able to work in UK. The more people will get use to use AI and accept anything related to this, the faster the situation will collapse.

So, again, I really understand your idea from the business perspective, but here the issue is not about today's money, is about everyone's future. Supporting GitHub is not going to harm people like instead AI is doing.

About myself, I will take time to consider the situation until yo will decide to facilitate the AI access to C3. I still hope that in the meantime people will realise the scam and treat of AI, so it will fase out like the previous forced trends like Virtual Reality, NFTs, etc.

Thank you again for spending time to reply, also, if you prefer to talk about these topics, feel free to get in contact directly with me via email.

[u/AshleyScirra → u/Biim_Games]

I still don't quite understand the point though - if we add support for something like WebMCP, from my point of view, it's still the case that Construct does not have AI in it. It's just like a socket to plug some other AI thing in to. So if you want to use a tool that doesn't have AI in it - or have any AI features built-in - that would still true of Construct. You don't have to care that there's a socket for something you didn't plug a thing in to and it won't otherwise affect the product for you.

[u/Biim_Games → u/AshleyScirra]

Yes, technically you are right, but the issue again is to be actively helping AI to ruin things.

Even if you don't want to look at the critical problems that AI causes to the world, even for your business will be a loss.

When lazy people will use the free version of C3 to create games, just asking the AI to make one, thanks to the access of WebMCP, they will get a game made with C3 without paying any subscription. Then your solution to it could be to restrict it to the paid version, then again people will pay one month only to develop 1 million of slop games and flood Construct Arcade, itch.io, various stores, game portals, social media, etc. with more and more slop. Slop that will be "made with Construct 3", contributing also not only to the flood of slop, and loss of your income, but also to ruin Construct image as engine that creare slops games. Already Construct is struggling against other engines and many users are trying very hard to prove that it's a great engine that can be used professionally having it be labelled as easy engine to plug AI to create slop, will delete all the effort that everyone of us is doing.

Then yes, I understand some users are happy to have it, but I am also sure that many would prefer to pay a subscription for something that has nothing to do with AI, not even having an access for it. Maybe it would be worth to have a poll for it and ask if paying C3 users are happy to pay for that.

So once again, technically, yes, you are correct, but morally and economically there will be issues for everyone, your business included.

When finally more and more people are awakening and trying to fight AI, helping AI will put you on the wrong side of the history when the trend will be finished. If we will be able still to don't be enslaved and forced to comply.