Cross Platform Development using Game SaladOne of the coolest things about the rise of the smartphone is the resurgence in home brew and small scale development. It is now possible to create a game on a zero budget that could potentially reach hundreds of millions of gamers.
One of the issues with mobile is the developer needs to support multiple hardware platforms with different environments. Products like Unity and GameSalad Creator aim to solve this issue and make development accessible to anyone who cares to try. Well last night I felt like doing some coding but I didn't feel like debugging DX11 fragment shader code, so I decided to give it a try... What is GameSalad?GameSalad Creator is a visual tool for developing mobile and html5 based games. You can follow this link to download it for free. GameSalad is a 2D game engine with physics support. It is ideal for creating Unhappy Avian style games. The developer drags and drops assets into a project, and then creates actors that use the assets. Scripting for the actors is done using a simple visual scripting language.
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Visual Scripting
GameSalad claims "no coding required!" and "almost limitless freedom" as features of their product. I would say that, some coding experience would be useful and that the api allows a lot of freedom within the sandbox that has been created.
With that being said, if you play by the rules of the sandbox you can create nice looking and playing apps very quickly. Last night I spent about 3 hours making an Aliens "Motion Detector".
Like learning any new system the most time consuming part was learning which features were the best fit for my design needs. For instance for the attacking aliens, I started by using the built in particle system but then changed to spawning actors because the particle system lacks an area emit function and I needed to emit particles inside a screen width box at the top of the screen. I've included a screen shot here of the "code" used to spawn the alien contact blips. As you can see every 0.2 seconds I spawn a blip just off the top of the screen.
With that being said, if you play by the rules of the sandbox you can create nice looking and playing apps very quickly. Last night I spent about 3 hours making an Aliens "Motion Detector".
Like learning any new system the most time consuming part was learning which features were the best fit for my design needs. For instance for the attacking aliens, I started by using the built in particle system but then changed to spawning actors because the particle system lacks an area emit function and I needed to emit particles inside a screen width box at the top of the screen. I've included a screen shot here of the "code" used to spawn the alien contact blips. As you can see every 0.2 seconds I spawn a blip just off the top of the screen.
Is this the future of Game Development?
Tools like GameSalad Creator are certainly part of the future for Game Development. They allow folks with limited time, money and experience to unleash their imagination and create fun projects.
I would also imagine that Creator would be a very good teaching tool as part of a first year curriculum on game design, programming and 2D art.
Stuff I liked:
I would also imagine that Creator would be a very good teaching tool as part of a first year curriculum on game design, programming and 2D art.
Stuff I liked:
- Easy installation
- Easy to get started
- Works as advertised
- Pretty much all the documentation takes the form of YouTube videos which isn't as quick as just scrolling through web pages to figure out how to do something.