Big Picture Update - Communication, Updates, and a Game Jam!
Yodapollo
Inactive, Chef Emeritus Posts: 447
Hey, everybody!
Sorry this has taken so long to post. I’ve finally had some time to write this and now I can give everyone a better idea on some of our plans -- namely improving our communication with you, our developers, and what to expect from our upcoming release, GameSalad 0.9.1. We’ve also got a little news about the upcoming Global Game Jam that we want to share.
We’ve made some changes over the last few weeks in an attempt to improve our communication with the community, in order to show everyone here how much you all mean to us and to help you get a better idea of where we are going.
That’s why this is going to be the last official “Big Picture.” Instead, we’re aiming for more regular updates to our community. I’m not talking about releases, but about more regular communication: more blog posts, more forum responses, and faster replies to private and contact emails. If we do this properly, there is no need for a way-too-long post like this one. I hope everyone here understands that, and I’m very excited to be able to share a little more on a regular basis. If you have any questions regarding it, feel free to private message me on the GameSalad site, or send me a note through our Contact page.
Now, for a little sneak peek at GameSalad 0.9.1.
With 0.9.1, we’re adding two major features: Pause/Unpause behavior and publishing to the Mac App Store. We’ve got a release candidate and it’s currently in QA review; we’re testing and testing and testing some more, making sure it’s ready to be released to the masses. When it comes to a launch date, I don’t have a definite date as it really depends on the results from QA and how they feel about it going out.
The new Pause/Unpause behaviors are very cool. They will allow you to apply the behavior to actors and rules that will cause the game to pause your current scene and overlay another scene (which you will select) as a pause scene. From the “pause” scene, you can apply the unpause behavior to clear the top scene and return to the scene that was paused. There are, of course, lots of other possibilities on how to use this, and we’ll have a more in-depth video of the behavior when 0.9.1 goes live on [mumble, mumble].
If there’s one thing I’m super excited about in 0.9.1, it’s Mac App Store publishing. We’ve made it about as easy as it can be. For us, it’s been lots of under-the-hood work; for you, it’s a couple of checkboxes when publishing to the Macintosh from GameSalad.
You will still need a Mac App Store Developer account, which I believe is another $99 a year to Apple, but the store is much more lightly populated than iOS and I think you’ll have a much better chance of being noticed and seen.
Of course, in addition to these two major features, we’ve made more performance and stability improvements. I know everyone here is concerned with the reported “slow down” issue, also known as the “dreaded memory leak” (this is abundantly obvious based on the feedback received from last week’s Feature survey). As I’ve said on the forums, it’s not a single bug unfortunately. It’s a collection of small bugs that have proven to be tricky little suckers for tracking down and correcting. That said, each release sees a number of them located and eliminated. It’s getting better and we hope to have the problem eliminated entirely within the next few releases.
That’s pretty much the rundown for GameSalad 0.9.1. In terms of where we go from there and an idea for a longer roadmap, I’m working on something right now to highlight our priorities to the community. You can expect to see a lot more from me, both here and on the GameSalad blog, which is where we’ll be sharing a lot of our big news. Also, expect to see a lot more of us on Twitter, Facebook, and Community Newsletters – be sure to follow or fan GameSalad if you’re not doing so already. The GameSalad community is much bigger than just the people on the forums, and we want to talk to everyone.
I have one last thing to talk about in this post, and then it’s full steam ahead. For those not familiar with it, this weekend (January 28th) brings the Global Game Jam. The GGJ is the worldwide superpower of game jams: it lasts 48 hours, with more than 5,000 independent developers creating more than 1,000 unique games on all types of platforms and using all kinds of tools. There are more than 150 locations worldwide where you can sign up and participate. We highly encourage everyone in our community to attend the nearest Global Game Jam site and participate in this year’s event.
Also, we’ll be announcing some big stuff related to this year’s Global Game Jam later on today.
To wrap up:
We’re done being super silent. We’re excited to talk to you on a regular basis -- we have lots to share and want to hear what’s on your mind.
0.9.1 is almost here. We’re just making sure it’s polished and pretty and everything works like it’s supposed to.
Global Game Jam is coming in a week. You should go. You should make a game. You should use GameSalad. You should pay attention on Monday for a super duper awesome announcement.
That’s it for this long Big Picture post – I actually think this is the longest one to date. Again, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to email via our Contact page, or just PM me on GameSalad.com. Thanks, everyone, and we’ll be talking even more often from now on!
Sorry this has taken so long to post. I’ve finally had some time to write this and now I can give everyone a better idea on some of our plans -- namely improving our communication with you, our developers, and what to expect from our upcoming release, GameSalad 0.9.1. We’ve also got a little news about the upcoming Global Game Jam that we want to share.
We’ve made some changes over the last few weeks in an attempt to improve our communication with the community, in order to show everyone here how much you all mean to us and to help you get a better idea of where we are going.
That’s why this is going to be the last official “Big Picture.” Instead, we’re aiming for more regular updates to our community. I’m not talking about releases, but about more regular communication: more blog posts, more forum responses, and faster replies to private and contact emails. If we do this properly, there is no need for a way-too-long post like this one. I hope everyone here understands that, and I’m very excited to be able to share a little more on a regular basis. If you have any questions regarding it, feel free to private message me on the GameSalad site, or send me a note through our Contact page.
Now, for a little sneak peek at GameSalad 0.9.1.
With 0.9.1, we’re adding two major features: Pause/Unpause behavior and publishing to the Mac App Store. We’ve got a release candidate and it’s currently in QA review; we’re testing and testing and testing some more, making sure it’s ready to be released to the masses. When it comes to a launch date, I don’t have a definite date as it really depends on the results from QA and how they feel about it going out.
The new Pause/Unpause behaviors are very cool. They will allow you to apply the behavior to actors and rules that will cause the game to pause your current scene and overlay another scene (which you will select) as a pause scene. From the “pause” scene, you can apply the unpause behavior to clear the top scene and return to the scene that was paused. There are, of course, lots of other possibilities on how to use this, and we’ll have a more in-depth video of the behavior when 0.9.1 goes live on [mumble, mumble].
If there’s one thing I’m super excited about in 0.9.1, it’s Mac App Store publishing. We’ve made it about as easy as it can be. For us, it’s been lots of under-the-hood work; for you, it’s a couple of checkboxes when publishing to the Macintosh from GameSalad.
You will still need a Mac App Store Developer account, which I believe is another $99 a year to Apple, but the store is much more lightly populated than iOS and I think you’ll have a much better chance of being noticed and seen.
Of course, in addition to these two major features, we’ve made more performance and stability improvements. I know everyone here is concerned with the reported “slow down” issue, also known as the “dreaded memory leak” (this is abundantly obvious based on the feedback received from last week’s Feature survey). As I’ve said on the forums, it’s not a single bug unfortunately. It’s a collection of small bugs that have proven to be tricky little suckers for tracking down and correcting. That said, each release sees a number of them located and eliminated. It’s getting better and we hope to have the problem eliminated entirely within the next few releases.
That’s pretty much the rundown for GameSalad 0.9.1. In terms of where we go from there and an idea for a longer roadmap, I’m working on something right now to highlight our priorities to the community. You can expect to see a lot more from me, both here and on the GameSalad blog, which is where we’ll be sharing a lot of our big news. Also, expect to see a lot more of us on Twitter, Facebook, and Community Newsletters – be sure to follow or fan GameSalad if you’re not doing so already. The GameSalad community is much bigger than just the people on the forums, and we want to talk to everyone.
I have one last thing to talk about in this post, and then it’s full steam ahead. For those not familiar with it, this weekend (January 28th) brings the Global Game Jam. The GGJ is the worldwide superpower of game jams: it lasts 48 hours, with more than 5,000 independent developers creating more than 1,000 unique games on all types of platforms and using all kinds of tools. There are more than 150 locations worldwide where you can sign up and participate. We highly encourage everyone in our community to attend the nearest Global Game Jam site and participate in this year’s event.
Also, we’ll be announcing some big stuff related to this year’s Global Game Jam later on today.
To wrap up:
We’re done being super silent. We’re excited to talk to you on a regular basis -- we have lots to share and want to hear what’s on your mind.
0.9.1 is almost here. We’re just making sure it’s polished and pretty and everything works like it’s supposed to.
Global Game Jam is coming in a week. You should go. You should make a game. You should use GameSalad. You should pay attention on Monday for a super duper awesome announcement.
That’s it for this long Big Picture post – I actually think this is the longest one to date. Again, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to email via our Contact page, or just PM me on GameSalad.com. Thanks, everyone, and we’ll be talking even more often from now on!
Comments
thanks.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the "Big Picture" as : "The entire perspective on a situation or issue "
The issue here is, where the heck is GS going, and far more importantly when are we going to get there.
Your "big picture" only identifies whats coming in the next update which has already been told to us two weeks ago.
We want to know whats happening with GS and we want to know it here on this forum. Not on twitter, Facebook or any other social networking sites. I don't want to have to create more accounts for sites I hate the concepts of so I can stay up to date with the software I have paid to use.
So please if you are going to discontinue the "big picture" posts, which by the way there hasn't been one for months so how freaking crapy to come back with one finally and say its not working so your discontinuing them, Could you please actually post some information that is useful to the community. He's a list that I know I for sure am interested in and i'm sure others are as well.
Features:
Game Center
In-App Purchases
Collision shapes
Splash Screen Options
Community:
Downloadable projects
user profile fixes
the fancy custom site that is supposed to be created when upload a distribution build of our game.
This is obviously a very small list and there are plenty of other great requests out there.
Another note is why the heck is Darren and Wayne having to sell a tool to the community that would really be a massive selling point for users if you integrated into GS. It's not like you have to rework everything . You just have to add a button in dashboard that will open it up as a standalone program and there you have it. users getting great things from the company they are doing business with. now your community is developing third party software to provide your users with a better experience. So I for one would like to know why it is you guys said no.
Sorry that you feel disappointed by this Big Picture post. To answer some of your concerns, every one of the features you mentioned in your list (GameCenter, In-App Purchases, Collision shapes, splash screen options) are in our list of top priorities for our engine and tool development team. I completely understand that you would love to have dates on these items, and I would love to give you dates. Unfortunately, I don't have dates to give you.
I can say that every single one of these items is being worked on. As they are completed, they are matched to a release and tested. As soon as we have them locked to a release, I will shout it far and wide and here on the forums.
I, in no way, meant to suggest that there would be information only available outside of the forums. I love these forums and if this is where you want to to get all your GS news, then that's where you'll get it. I just wanted to remind people who also enjoy other avenues that info is available there as well. Not info here or there, just options based on people's preferences.
Our web team just made some new hires, so the fixes for the website (all of the community items you mentioned above) are now on the schedule for them. We've been tight in terms of web development bandwidth of late, but our recent additions should alleviate much of that.
As for Darren's & Wayne's incredible tool, we haven't officially said no. I hope this helps give you some of the answers you were looking for. Thanks for the honest feedback. Believe it or not, it's this kind of open discussion that makes me love this community.
-- Yodapollo
EDIT
Nice to see you already being active!
Makes me happy
Also thanks for more information regarding the list of priorities.
One more thing, I would like to know if we may see a re-sizable grid system in 0.9.1 or 0.9.2.
A re-sizable grid system makes since for this type of software. (re-sizable = think Game Maker's grid system.)
@PossesiveGaming:
Yep, Yoda is starting to fulfill his promise. Glad to see it happening.
Also, it seems to have helped the community. There seems to be more people (than usual) online now. Oh no... my dreams of moving to warmer climates are shattered. HA HA. On the bright side, I might be able to update my profile icon soon. HA HA.
Well, looking forward to more presence on the forum from you. Hopefully it will be consistent.
I need to think more positively I have been very negative lately. So GS pls don't let us down.
Yoda can we see GS priorities like ranked and whats looking like is going to be next. In-app purchases and gamecenter should have already been here the reviews left for our games show the demand is there these should be number 1 I would have rather had these before the features in 0.9.1 so I think you guys need to give the community your priority list and if the top priority is still left out of a release then you need to give an explanation why. we are all developers and know somethings happen and take longer than expected or have trouble implementing but being honest is whats going to keep people calm.
Thanks for the post I hope that 0.9.1 won't stay on QA too long. By the way as long as Mac App Store is concerned, have you implemented receipt checking or some kind of piracy protection? It seems that on the Mac it's easier than on the iPhone.
@tenrdrmer: I also would like to see cool features to be implemented in GS, but I think that it would be better to give priority to a big boost on performance on the creator and on the engine. A nice performing fast loading and fast scene switching socialnetworkless game is likely to have better ratings than a crappy slow app with GameCenter one. I hate to have to delete cool things from a scene because it will kill fps or because the scene will take ages to load.
P.S. Hey Yoda could you tell the web guys to implement an automatic yellow dot to appear on threads with yellow posts? It would be nice to see immediately which threads have yellow posts in them.
As far as I know we have implemented Apple's receipt checking. Honestly, I don't know much on the details beyond that. But I do know there is receipt checking included in Mac App Store publishing.
Also, that's an interesting idea for the forums. I actually manage all the plugins and such for the Forums. I'll do some snooping and see if I can find a plugin that's happy with our version of the software.
-- Yodapollo
In-App purchases would be so amazing for the success of our games. Every app I would release from then on would be a free app with in app purchases. free app by default get better downloads which mean more people actually looking at your game and then having the option to add levels or features on the impulse buy is far more likely than buying an unknown from the app store.
Our customers want these features and they want them bad. Our supplier, GameSalad, needs to step up and provide it so we can pass it to our customers. Otherwise our customers will look else where for their gaming
In-App would work really well with puzzle or other static games, but with a lagging action game? I don't want to be limited for the sake of hardcore optimization.
Especially in light of the post from a couple of days ago about a "Lite" version veing rejected with the explaination being .... "Why don't you have a free version and use in app purchasing"
Gamecentre is also top of my list. I'd love to be able to get some leaderboards going.
~CTM
An official marketplace is definitely an intriguing notion and one that has definitely caught the collective eye of the entire GameSalad team. Near future? Can't really say, wish I could.
-- Yodapollo
~CTM
Thank you Yoda and all other GameSalad team...
Give us the features we really need. Doh...
I am curious, how long your motivation to communicate will last this time...
If, and only if it becomes a bona fide requirement by Apple should this be put in above stuff like social features/Gamecentres/Arrays.
No-one listened when the kids yelled about wanting iAds so they could make their games free.
Now people want in-app purchasing.
Tell me. If your game doesn't capture people's imaginations, then what use are ads and iaps?
Just my $0.02
QS
Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quantum_Sheep
Web: https://quantumsheep.itch.io