I recently started playing with GameSalad, and after digging through some of the first tutorials and making a simple test game, I'm very impressed with it. I'm starting on a new ambitious Zelda-like adventure game for the iPhone and after being impressed with GameSalad, I figured I should go ahead and buy the $99 license and get to work. But then I realized that GameSalad has a couple of severe limitations that I didn't realize before, that prevent me from using it for my new game. The big one: there's no way to save state. If your game is longer than something you can beat in one sitting (like if it's plot-based), you can't use GameSalad. Also, since you can't save and load data, there's no way to make a high scores list. What sort of iPhone games don't have high scores lists? Also, there isn't yet support for social gaming networks like OpenFeint. And if I wanted to roll my own achievements system in GS, it would be kind of useless because I wouldn't be able to save what achievements were achieved the next time the player opens the game. So now I have a $99 GameSalad license, but I can't use it to make my next game. It is fun to work with though (so far), and I think I can probably make some pretty sweet games in just a couple days with it. So I want to still put my license to good use. I keep hearing that ideas are a dime a dozen, so here's a request for ideas. With these limitations (no saving, no high scores), what kind of iPhone games would be fun?
well obviously it couldn't be one of those 'just have to beat my high score' games. hmm... this is a bit hard, I'll get back to you.
I was actually thinking maybe two-player (on one device) turn-based games might work with this. Something like tic-tac-toe or battleship (though if it were battleship, you could cheat). This way the challenge comes in playing against your friend, rather than competing for high scores. But it would be cool to take advantage of live-action physics stuff though .
I've never used GameSalad so this could be totally useless... but is there any way you could generate a level password like the good ol' days?
Heh, like Lemmings! Yeah I think you can do smoething like that. But I'm afraid that it would get lots of bad reviews if you made people use level passwords and things, because it's making the player do more work. And also, you can make a game where they can just select any level without needing a password, and just play whichever one they feel like. I think I've actually seen a couple puzzle games in the App Store like that.
Yeah, Flickitty does that. We have a recommended path, but don't force the player to follow it and all regions are unlocked by default. They just get increasingly more difficult. Megaman also followed this, but to a greater extent. You could go to any level and fight any boss, but sometimes it was easier to fight a certain boss first to take his weapon and use it against the next boss.
Thought I'd search for "gamesalad" on AppShopper out of curiosity... this is the only game that came up: http://appshopper.com/games/brickone
Here are lists of games made with GameSalad on their blog: http://gamesalad.com/blog/2009/11/20/this-weeks-iphone-releases-5/ http://gamesalad.com/blog/2009/11/13/this-weeks-iphone-releases-4/ http://gamesalad.com/blog/2009/11/06/this-weeks-iphone-releases-3/ I haven't yet taken a good look at all of those. And yeah, I actually really like how Flickity does it. But it really helps that when you close the game and come back to it later, you're at the same place where you left off, and it remembers which tasks you've already completed, which makes it way nicer. You can't quite do that with GS. GameSalad is a pretty amazing tool, and very cheap for tools of its kind. But this lack of saving thing makes it really hard to make a serious iPhone game...
Yeah, I think saving game states is pretty important on a mobile platform. Sometimes, people don't have time to dedicate a solid 30 minutes to a mobile game- sometimes they only have 5 minutes. I don't know anything about GameSalad, but is seems pretty dumb not to have the basic functionality of a save state. However, setting up the save state in Flickitty was pretty tough to do. It doesn't just grab and store the pointers- those are invalid on a restore. The game essentially restarts as normal, then grabs a table of data that stores the entity, its location and rotation and spawns all new entities. For the tasks, I had to store which ones were completed. If your game has any complexity at all- like the state of each entity, it becomes way more complex. For instance, I don't store how much damage the rocks have taken, they are fully restored with full health. So I guess looking at that, adding a generic save state to a game might be really difficult. As I said before, you can't simply store pointers.
I just bought Z is for Zombie, which is an iPhone game that was featured by Apple that was made with GameSalad. It's a cute hand-drawn zombie shooter, and despite not being able to save they did a pretty good job I think. There are I think 3 different levels and you can either play "story mode" (which starts at the first level and shows some comic story stuff, and lets you continue onto other levels) or freeplay, which lets you select the level you want, or survival which seems to be its own separate level. Each time you select story it starts from the beginning, but it doesn't seem all that long to begin with anyway. Hmm, that sort of gameplay seems decent for a GS game...
Ok, I have a few different ideas; you were saying a tic tac toe game, but theres already a good amount of them in the appstore, so my idea is this: you could make a cube( like a rubix cube) and basically have a T.T.T. grid on each side and have a game going all around it. Obviously not a fully developed idea, cause I'm not exactly sure how it would be played, so yeah just an idea. Another idea would be like a card games app, with things like go fish that could be single player or two player. My other idea was basically the game "Catch Phrase." I'm not sure if you played it before, so basically you choose a category from things like sports, culinary, around the house etc. and then the first person gets a subject ( say in SPORTS they get JOE MONTANA) so then they have to describe the subject without saying any of the words in the subject and have everyone else guess it. and then they pass it to the next person and so on. You could look up the exact rules online. But I think that could transfer very easily to the iphone with a nice, polished interface. I also have another idea, but that wouldn't fit with your program because it is a highscore game. I'll probably come up with even more later.
BTW I'd be glad to help with whatever you end up doing. I'm an artist ( a bit inexperienced though) but I could help with the simple stuff like a menu screen or the icon.
Gamesalad is cool.. I just messed a bit with the free version and uploaded a simple game on the site. I somewhat assumed that the app creation thing worked by exporting an Xcode project out of your GS project. Couldn't you later modify this project and add openfeint support or whatever?
Hmm, a 3d tic-tac-toe and a kind of word game, and card games. These are good ideas. I'm thinking it would be especially cool to come up with games that have some action, like with sprites moving and collision detection and stuff, even with bad guys with simple AI. GameSalad makes that sort of thing very easy. Although more static puzzle games would also be cool. Actually, pacman would probably be decent for GS too... Apparently with the latest version of GS it doesn't even make an Xcode project anymore, it just uses Xcode in the background to sign your binary with your provisioning profile and gives you the .app file. To play it on your iPhone you just drag it into iTunes. But there was actually a thread about that on the GameSalad forums, about modifying the Xcode project after making it in GS. I asked if it would break the license to do stuff like add OpenFeint, but I haven't heard back yet.
Hmm no save and no highscores really takes out some of the best types of games. I honestly cannot think of any apart from the afore mentioned tic tac toe and other board games.
Yeah, if you tried to edit the xcode project, it would just make the app invalid. hopefully they do something about it. any question about GS you can ask me, Because i beta tested for them from the beginning, and two of my games are currently in review with apple.
Extreme Stickboarding Ok, I just went to the game salad website to see their exact capabilities. I'm thinking about downloading the free version to test it out, because it looks pretty cool. While I was watching the Z is for Zombie trailer, I had an awesome idea for a game... Extreme Stickboarding. I got the idea from the cool stick figure sketch-type art style. Basically it is a stick figure skate boarding game. it would be 2d with no turning and no going backwards (well maybe; this would all be completely up to you) Well your in a city and your on an average sidewalk with your skateboard. Their would be an accelerate button and a decelerate button on the bottom left of the screen. On the bottom right there would be an "A" button with essentially the same function as the crouch button in Tony Hawk PS2 games(where you hold to crouch, release to ollie). You would have your "B" button which would have grind capabilities. I think that for when you catch air, it could be a tilt control for spins. The only thing I'm not sure of would be how to do flip tricks and grabs. I have a few ideas like separte flip and grab buttons, or having just simple swipe and/or tap controls where you could swipe in differnt directions for grabs, and tap so many times for flips. You could also do this the other way around. Anyway, I have even more ideas for this like more game modes (create-a-park etc.), and otherdirections for the game to go in. I'd go into A LOT more detail if you are really interested, but if you are not then I hope some developer is.
