GameSalad can make some cool games

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by micah, Feb 5, 2010.

  1. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
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    game developer
    San Francisco
    I've noticed some GameSalad hating in this forum, with people saying you should really learn to program if you want to be serious about making iPhone games. I'm already a programmer, but I decided to try GameSalad to see if it can speed up my development time.

    And my verdict is:
    - It saves tooons of time
    - It's extremely powerful once you spend the day or two it takes to learn how to use it (it really helps if you're already a programmer)
    - Some of the limitations can be obnoxious and frustrating
    - It's still in beta so it's pretty buggy, which can also be obnoxious and frustrating

    And they recently updated GameSalad to 0.8.3 which broke my game when it was 90% done, and caused me to spend hours and hours fixing it, which was also pretty frustrating.

    But regardless, I think that it's a serious tool that can be used to make quality iPhone games. And they are regularly updating it to include great features, so it keeps getting better. Two updates ago they made it so you can save and load variables, which is huge because now you can effectively save state. Last update they included multiple resolutions (including 1024x768 for iPad) and made it so you can build your projects as Mac games as well as iPhone games.

    So I just finished my first GameSalad game and submitted it to the App Store today. It's called Aeropack, and you can download the free Mac version at http://www.insurgentgames.com/aeropack/. I think it's high quality, and I'm charging $2.99 for it in the App Store. And it was made without any real "programming".
     
  2. simplymuzik3

    simplymuzik3 Well-Known Member

    Aug 12, 2009
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    Wow, your game looks pretty good. Im going to take a good look at game salad now! I think it's best to wait until it gets released though. Will it be free to download and use once its no longer beta?
     
  3. Nice job on the game Micah! I think I will check it out actually. I have a few simple ideas that I haven't gotten around to just because I know they will take time.

    Did they add the ability to save/load game state yet?
     
  4. da shiz wiz 19

    da shiz wiz 19 Well-Known Member

    Sep 24, 2009
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    Yes saving and loading attributes are now in gamesalad.

    I also have it and it is pretty sweet. Just sayin'
     
  5. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
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    San Francisco
    @simplymuzik3 It'll probably still be awhile (several months at least) before GameSalad goes out of beta. The bugs are annoying, but it's always getting better. I think it will always be free to use and to publish web games, but you need to buy at least the indie license ($99/year) to publish to iPhone or Mac. They might raise that price when it comes out of beta, but I don't know. Right now it's pretty cheap.

    @MindJuice Yup, the save/load feature works now. Your game is organized into scenes, and the scenes have actors. So you have game attributes which anything can access, scene attributes which only actors on that scene can access, and actor attributes that are local to individual actors. The save and load feature just lets you put in your pseudo-scripting to save attributes and load specific attributes in key-value pairs. So it would be hard to save really huge complicated states, but to save what level you left off on, or the top 10 scores, is easy.
     
  6. spacefrog

    spacefrog Active Member

    Oct 9, 2009
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    how does the perfomance (eg. of this game) scale on the iphone (older 3G) ?
    i played a bit with gamesalad, and for my taste it's too limited and too basic (and i already know how to code ;-) ) . This is the biggest concern about the upcoming Flash CS5 export possibility for me -and most others i think - too . So i'm interested in the performance.
     
  7. sam the lion

    sam the lion Well-Known Member

    Jan 12, 2009
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    I'm glad your GS subscription turned out to be useful. I also agree that GS can be used for nice things and despite not being "coding" I do think that knowing general programming paradigms turns out to be useful to take out the most of it.
    You're game seems nice, I'm downloading the Mac version as we speak. Is it also GS based? Is that actually possible?
     
  8. tukun

    tukun Well-Known Member

    Oct 7, 2009
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    Congratz on the submission micah !!:)
    GS looks pretty cool
    but for programmers like myself, I'd still prefer coding over using engine such as GS. Coding give me a huge amount of flexibility that I dotn think I would find in GS.

    Still I'd see GS is a great tool for prototyping n test ideas.
     
  9. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
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    @spacefrog The performance actually isn't half bad. I have an iPod Touch 2g (so not the new hardware at all) and a couple of the later levels with tons going on in my game it gets a little choppy, but it's pretty good for the most part. And the newest update they released (besides breaking my game) made the FPS jump from about 22 to 32. You should definitely test it on the device though, because playing through the game on the computer never seems to have any performance issues.

    @sam the lion Yes, the Mac version was made with GS also. Just like how Unity 3D can publish to Windows, Mac, Wii, and iPhone, right now GameSalad can publish to web, Mac, and iPhone.

    @tukun I agree coding gives you lots of flexibility. Really I think one of GS's greatest strengths is it's basically a huge powerful level editor that can work for lots of types of games. So any game with lots of content and complicated levels, GS would be good with because you wouldn't have to write your own level editor. There's definitely games that just don't fit though. Personally I'm still hoping to find a solution where I can easily make cross-platform games for iPhone and Android, but I'll definitely keep using GS for certain projects.
     
  10. drelbs

    drelbs Well-Known Member

    Jun 25, 2009
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    Is it just the games I've purchased, or are all GameSalad games upside down? (Home button on the left, which is upside down for iPod Touch owners...)

    That's what makes me cringe every time I see the "Made with GameSalad" screen pop up.
     
  11. MidianGTX

    MidianGTX Well-Known Member

    Jun 16, 2009
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    Danger Cats and Stunt Squirrels are my two favourite examples of GameSalad games being done well. The only drawback is the horrible load times.
     
  12. sam the lion

    sam the lion Well-Known Member

    Jan 12, 2009
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    Sweet, I thought it was just web/iphone.
    The game is a blast!
     
  13. Kamazar

    Kamazar Well-Known Member

    Dec 13, 2008
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    While I love the program, I just had to stop using it do to inconsistent performance. I'm sure I'll revisit it soon enough, but aside from the always present memory leaks and/or other bugs, there's just not enough there to make a full game yet. Sure, the save/load was a huge step forward, but what about high scores? I can't even type a name in. Export to x-code would be fantastic to integrate openfeint, but now that's gone, too. I just think it needs some work. I'll definitely revisit it, though, I've invested way too much time in it not too (along with a 80% finished game).
     
  14. fwish

    fwish Well-Known Member

    I guess your new game will be featured again:D
     
  15. kahanejosh

    kahanejosh Well-Known Member

    Mar 10, 2009
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    Student - Game Developer
    England, UK
    I just want to back Micah on this. He is right, GameSalad is a truly powerful tool when used to its full potential and can produce some great games as you can see. As far as I am concerned GameSalad will only get better at this moment in time and is always have new features introduced which really make games great.

    Here is link to my game Trouball which was made with GameSalad.
    http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/trouball/id352348867?mt=8
     
  16. kohjingyu

    kohjingyu Well-Known Member

    Mar 20, 2009
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    Student/Developer
    Singapore
    GameSalad saves lots of time, I agree, but can't integrate social systems like OpenFeint into games for now, which is really important in all games. Online leaderboards also aren't available, and they are really important for games.

    I would like it better if you could edit the Xcode project after you deploy it, which would allow much more things to be added.

    Also, projects created are very limited and very repetitive.
     
  17. mobile1up

    mobile1up Well-Known Member

    Nov 6, 2008
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    Munich, Germany
    i think something like gamesalad is great for proof of concepts.

    however; when you want to build a published game; you need as mentioned integration with social networks, high score leader boards and also some flexibility when it come to what you can do with the application itself. "limited and very repetitive" pretty much sums it up i think - where are the dynamics? can you do cool things like play music backwards when the game mode goes into reverse etc?

    if you want highest quality; polished solutions - you gotta code.
     
  18. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
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    game developer
    San Francisco
    Thanks fwish! I just found out that Aeropack is now getting featured under Hot New Games on the iPhone and New and Noteworthy in iTunes!
     

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