The only thing I disagree with you on is this. Its much better to have leaderboards then to not too. Not all games are made for playing together. Angry Birds, Pocket God and Doodle Jump are examples.
Online leadersboards are the most important missing feature for my upcoming game. Are extremely important and I hope that they will be integrated asap.
chosenonestudios said: The only thing I disagree with you on is this. Its much better to have leaderboards then to not too. Not all games are made for playing together. Angry Birds, Pocket God and Doodle Jump are examples.
I disagree only because at this time we have many other things that are much more important.
* Stability (GS games crash too much, most likely due to all the memory leaks) * Speed (GS games are painfully slow to load a scene) * Pause (silly that this feature wasn't in on day one)
Almost all the GS games I see out there do not even save high scores, let alone have a leaderboard. And not a single game allows the user to enter their name in the high score. The majority of games lack polish such as button states (make the buttons animate when clicked).
A leaderboard is not going to help sell a game that can't even meet the points above.
Simplicity is key, and yet it would be impossible to even create a game of tic-tac-toe between two players without having at least a robust scripting system. Not that such a thing is not useful, but adding it would complicate Game Salad to the point that people would be better off skipping it in favor of Torque or Unity because they already have ALL these features and only cost 200 bucks more than GS.
I like Game Salad and thats why I am here. But if GS ever required any form of scripting, or if I needed one of these features such as GameCenter, I would abandon it and just use a better engine (Torque or Unity at this point), and if that didn't work I would write native code in XCode. But having to do that, would defeat the purpose of what Game Salad is good at, which is rapid development of very simple 2D games. There is nothing wrong with that and nothing to be ashamed of. Without a doubt Game Salad is the best at what it does for the iPhone, and I would hate to see some feature like GameCenter stuffed in half assed when a "real" implementation would, scratch that, MUST allow synchronization of multiple clients. If only a leaderboard is what you want, they already exist (Open Feint for example), and Gendai has not even implemented that.
LAdrian said: Online leadersboards are the most important missing feature for my upcoming game. Are extremely important and I hope that they will be integrated asap.
Don't hold your breath, we don't even have OpenFeint and you are asking for something more complicated than that Break out the Objective C and you can have all that right now if its so important.
Your missing the point. You said having online leaderboards in GS was worthless because GC is about playing with each other. I disagreed saying online leaderboards would be beneficial to all games.
You kinda got sidetracked and went off on a tangent. Your talking about how it needs performance arrays etc, before GC support, I never said it didn't, I was just saying online leaderboards would be beneficial. That's all.
Yep, stability and performance first and then online leaderboars. I'm an artist, I don't want to learn C or Xcode but i'm hoping to make enough money with the first or second game to hire someone that know... that is if GS doesn't evolve the way I need
Btw, Torque is crap. I have a pro license and if you think GS has performance or stability issues then you shouldn't go nowhere near Torque
TymeMaster said: If you want those kinds of features, perhaps you have outgrown the playground and its time to step it up and become a real developer?
and what do you mean by that?
how many products of yours have been downloaded? I've got over 300k downloads between my free and paid games, and the number 1 request feature is online leaderboards.
like i said before, people are not going to be playing interactive online multiplayer games on the go. 3G is just not fast enough, if it's even available. Online Leaderboards however does keep people coming back to play these types of games. It's not going to do anything for a crappy game, but if people like your game, it's one more reason to keep people coming back.
online multiplayer will be awesome, but it's never going to take off over 3G until speeds and stability improve.
and of course this all comes after the massive speed / performance and stability improvements GS needs.
Photics said: Well, I'm tired of the waiting game. My countdown is set at 9 days. One of the three things should improve...
1) The cost of "Pro" is too expensive. 2) Communication between Gendai Games and the GameSalad community is poor. 3) Updates are too slow... and lately, unremarkable.
A difficult decision is still looming... do I renew for another year or do I simply do something else? Game Center could be awesome... but when? If it's not this week or next week, other games will jump ahead.
Meanwhile, Pro is too expensive. I could be releasing free games right now, but $1999 is a steep investment.
Leaderboards and achievements encourage replay. That's great for free games. So, it could be an awesome year for GameSalad... add iAds with GameCenter and it could be a winner.
...but Pro is too expensive ...Gendai Games doesn't state a clear roadmap ...and the updates are too slow.
I have to renew my IPhone developer registration in about a week. It's a strong possibility that I'm just not going to do that.
Comments
* Stability (GS games crash too much, most likely due to all the memory leaks)
* Speed (GS games are painfully slow to load a scene)
* Pause (silly that this feature wasn't in on day one)
Almost all the GS games I see out there do not even save high scores, let alone have a leaderboard. And not a single game allows the user to enter their name in the high score. The majority of games lack polish such as button states (make the buttons animate when clicked).
A leaderboard is not going to help sell a game that can't even meet the points above.
Simplicity is key, and yet it would be impossible to even create a game of tic-tac-toe between two players without having at least a robust scripting system. Not that such a thing is not useful, but adding it would complicate Game Salad to the point that people would be better off skipping it in favor of Torque or Unity because they already have ALL these features and only cost 200 bucks more than GS.
I like Game Salad and thats why I am here. But if GS ever required any form of scripting, or if I needed one of these features such as GameCenter, I would abandon it and just use a better engine (Torque or Unity at this point), and if that didn't work I would write native code in XCode. But having to do that, would defeat the purpose of what Game Salad is good at, which is rapid development of very simple 2D games. There is nothing wrong with that and nothing to be ashamed of. Without a doubt Game Salad is the best at what it does for the iPhone, and I would hate to see some feature like GameCenter stuffed in half assed when a "real" implementation would, scratch that, MUST allow synchronization of multiple clients. If only a leaderboard is what you want, they already exist (Open Feint for example), and Gendai has not even implemented that.
You kinda got sidetracked and went off on a tangent. Your talking about how it needs performance arrays etc, before GC support, I never said it didn't, I was just saying online leaderboards would be beneficial. That's all.
Btw, Torque is crap. I have a pro license and if you think GS has performance or stability issues then you shouldn't go nowhere near Torque
how many products of yours have been downloaded? I've got over 300k downloads between my free and paid games, and the number 1 request feature is online leaderboards.
like i said before, people are not going to be playing interactive online multiplayer games on the go. 3G is just not fast enough, if it's even available. Online Leaderboards however does keep people coming back to play these types of games. It's not going to do anything for a crappy game, but if people like your game, it's one more reason to keep people coming back.
online multiplayer will be awesome, but it's never going to take off over 3G until speeds and stability improve.
and of course this all comes after the massive speed / performance and stability improvements GS needs.
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"We're looking for great Game Center games to feature, so please let me know asap when you expect to submit from now to the next week."
So Gendai cmon!
Meanwhile, Pro is too expensive. I could be releasing free games right now, but $1999 is a steep investment.
Leaderboards and achievements encourage replay. That's great for free games. So, it could be an awesome year for GameSalad... add iAds with GameCenter and it could be a winner.
...but Pro is too expensive
...Gendai Games doesn't state a clear roadmap
...and the updates are too slow.
I have to renew my IPhone developer registration in about a week. It's a strong possibility that I'm just not going to do that.