Easy iOS game development with GameSalad | Hacker News Reader

Easy iOS game development with GameSalad

gamesalad.com

67 pointsbrisance29 comments

Why do they have the video set to 720p when they explicitly make the container 340px tall?

  <object width="560" height="340">...</object>

That's just annoying. And makes me drop it down so my internet connection can stream it. And beyond worthless, becoming wasteful, because even 480p is more than it can display but you're draining my battery more with increased CPU use.

They probably did this expecting that many users would use the full-screen capability of the video player, and lacked either the technology in hand or the time to set up a means to have it use a different file for low- vs high-res playback.

There was major uproar from apple about quality issues if they were to allow flash games as standalone apps(not browser). Meaning a major influx of low quality games or apps. I'm surprised a framework like this doesnt bring up the same concerns from apple.

Well, didn't they relent and allow the Flash-to-ObjectiveC compiler through?

Yes, they did: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/packagerforiphone/

I would think the market should be responsible for judging quality, not a sole company. On the app store you can request a refund, or give a review as well.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

Nintendo revived the industry in part by exerting quality control over every game released for the NES, and this has been standard practice for console manufacturers ever since.

You have that. It's called the Android market. "Well, just let the market decide" is a naive/overly simplistic approach. There is an issue of people being able to find the apps their looking for and it's not easy to solve. The more rubbish apps you have the harder it is for people to find things they like. Eventually your app store gets the reputation of being filled with crap.

The market does come into play though. For the app stores. Last I heard, your Android app making 50% of what your Apple one does is a realistic expectation.

I've toyed with doing an "easy game maker" but have always ended up leaning towards making high-powered "real" tools (whatever those are) instead.

My current goal is to make a game IDE that resembles a Smalltalk or perhaps Emacs-esque system - highly reflective, image-based, extensible, but more specifically game-focused, with the core features and main loop hardcoded, but everything else being part of the same system. The current state of the art in these tools(Game Maker, Unity, UDK) tends to stop just a little bit short of this "build tool and game very closely together" idea, but the way I see it, that's nearly the last major win for iteration times, within our current understanding of the development proces.

I've been tinkering with Corona http://www.anscamobile.com/ which is not point-clicky like Gamesalad, but rather a framework/mechanism for implementing apps/games on mobile devices in Lua, with various support for physics and so on in the box. I think the idea is to be somewhere between Gamesalad and Objective C, in terms of:

* effort * amount of code you need to write * flexibility

I've no idea if it's actually good; I've just been tinkering. But it seems worth a look.

http://jonbeebe.tumblr.com/post/1119939987/corona-sdk-review

Very interesting. I think "No coding. Ever." is a little disingenuous, some of the screenshots sure look like coding disguised as rules systems, which I would expect to break down into an awful mess for anything complex. But I still like seeing things like this, and it does look very slick. I think things like this are a great way to get kids into game development, for one thing.

Reminds me of The Arcade Construction Set from when I was a kid. I was already programming stuff in Basic by the time I got that, but it was still a blast to drag a few things around and see instant results. You're not going to make the next Quake or Angry Birds that way, but it's a great first step.

I even hope I'm wrong and someone does make the next Angry Birds with this thing. The lower the barrier to entry on game design is, the more great games we all get to play that would've otherwise existed only in someone's head (Just as long as someone else filters out the corresponding increase in awful games before they get to me :)

Although I cannot speak for Gamesalad in particular, don't underestimate the ability of tools to be able to create some great games, even in the absence of raw programming power.

At Blizzard, rumor has it that the programming team calls it a day long before any game is released (sometimes a year in advance) because their map editors are so powerful that the game designers don't really need anything else.

There are 3rd party "maps" out there for games like Warcraft or Starcraft that implement an entirely different genre of games. I fondly remember playing a racing game inside Warcraft 3.

Rules are expressed in a manner similar to what I've seen of Gamesalad -- they can indeed be quite powerful.

Speaking as a Blizzard programmer, I can tell you there is no basis to that rumor.

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not discounting the rest of your points. It is indeed possible to do very sophisticated things with triggers, rules, or what have you, you just tend, in my experience, to wind up with something significantly harder to read and maintain than something written more traditionally. Which is probably why Blizzard's RTS's include actual scripting languages as well.

"Probably" as in I am a Blizzard programmer, but I'm not on the RTS team and haven't worked on any of those games directly other than a tiny bit of Battle.net code for SC2. It's possible, even likely, you know more about SC2/WC3 modding than I do :)

Blizzard feels like the Apple of the gaming world- slowly, but consistently dishing out great products which you can trust to be fun and exciting.

And yes, the editors are very powerful. Look no further than "DotA" which has spawned no less than THREE spinoff games:

League of Legends, Heroes of Newearth and now the main developer(IceFrog) of DotA has gone on to develop DotA 2 for Valve.

I haven't worked with a single game designer that hasn't within a few hours needed something 'more' from what ever you give them.

It's the nature if the beast that designers want more from AI/Scripting coders who in turn want more from the engine coders who in turn want more from the hardware manufacturers and 3rd party libs they use who in turn want more from the electrical engineers who in turn want more from the silicon researchers who in turn want more from the physicists who usually ignore you.

That's the games industry :)

For kids (likely the target audience of this), the $99 developer program fee would be quite high (let alone the fact they have to register under a parent's name) -- I don't think this will really make an impact on the App Store.

I'm 31 and it looks like something I'll definitely be trying - especially to help convert some of my Android apps for release in the App store.

Interesting. I would assume that the Mac+dev-program+testing-device combo would convince people to either go for a full-fledged port or not go through with the idea. (Do note that iOS users aren't accustomed to anything non-native, even just an alternative-styled button can throw them off, although this is less of a restriction in games.)

I'd be more interested in something like this if it acted as training wheels for my Objective C learning experience, rather than a complete replacement.

The mechanics seem solid, and there's plenty of room to play, but I'm not sure there's room to be unique.

Are there any success stories of app store rankings or new businesses being built as a result of this engine?

It looks like, from the game library, you can be as unique as you allow your imagination to allow.

If you just jump in and tweak one of their tutorials, you won't get far, but if you take your time, design great graphics, write a fun story, etc, why couldn't you be a huge success with this?

My initial reaction was that there is no way this thing works, but over 3,000 games have been made with this thing:

http://gamesalad.com/games

Thats not to say anything about the quality of the games, but that is still an impressive number. Much like Game Maker, I am sure there are some gems in there.

An explanation or more details of each feature that PRO differs from Basic in the pricing page would be nice. Specially the "iAd Functionality".

And the plugin is just for safari? You are ignoring a huge slice of potential users. No idea if it's worth it developing the plugin for other browsers though.

They have iOS development for iOS now? Awesome. What will Apple think of next?

Sorry about that, and thanks for pointing it out. Fixed.

do we own the app after ? or should we share royalties with Gamesalad? someone knows?

Building frameworks like this for game developers is similar to building handicapped escalators for people who compete in running marathons.

That 14 year old Kuwaiti boy who developed Doodle Destroy over 3 days with 900K downloads and being featured on CNN would strongly disagree.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/10/05/kuwait.iphone.teen...

Cool but what about easy iOS game development for Android..?

Google App Inventor, of course...

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