Flipping Sprites, Sprite Sheets, Saving, and Parallax Scrolling

Blooze

Awesome tool had few suggestions that would help in creating games with Game Salad some have been mentioned in this forum before.

Flip Images - some way to flip sprites to make as a example characters walk in the opposite direction without having to add custom sprites, this will save on memory and expands the possibilities for game ideas. Something even basic like a variable that says it actor is moving in a negative direction from previous location -negative scale 100% on x flip.

Sprite Sheets - animations set up on a single image in a grid this would help with the Images folder being cluttered with images and make it easier to import animation. example a 512x512 could have a grid 128 of images on it.

Saving - essential for most modern games and iPhone games some way to save/pause or pause and save the game state, this would be cool for incoming calls on iPHone or when someone needs to quit the game and don't want to start over.

Parallax Scrolling Backgrounds - Adds a nice level of polish to side scrollers, shooters and expands game possibilities

Also some additional features that would be nice

- Item, pickup, Inventory Management System
- some sort of Pathfinding System
- no 10 megabit limit for iPhone or web games make it creators choice many if not most of the top 25 games are way over 10 megabits many iPhone users use/have wifi and will download games in the 50 to 100 megabit range with no problem.

thanks GameSalad is a great piece of software.

JGary321

Hey Blooze, welcome to the forum. I agree that those are some cool ideas. I will point out that some are already possible.

For instance, pausing the game is. There is a tutorial on the wiki.

When saving is introduce pausing/saving will be easy, since you can setup pause now. Items. pickups, inventory management is all possible with the current version. You just have to make that stuff.

Pathfinding - you can do this, but I would love to see this get easier also. At this point it would probably be ALOT of rules to get it to really be a good pathfinding.

I would love to see sprite sheet compatability. First it saves on time. Second if you have a sprite sheet you really don't need the flipping feature, since it could easily be put on the sprite sheet. Not sure if this will be easy to implement though.

Fellow board members & myself have discussed the 10mb limit. We would love to see the limit raised, but we also understand that MOST games are actually UNDER 10mb. The majority of people will NOT download a game over 10mb, unless it is a highly anticipated game. For instance, Need For Speed. Most of us agree that even ourselves don't typically download anything over 10mb. Unless ATT/Apple raises the download limit over 3g to more than 10mb, I would try to keep most games under that.

Also on the subject, unless you're creating a 3d game, (which game salad does not support currently) 10mb is tons of room. Remember it will be compressed when it is converted to .app

Have fun, welcome to the board, & if you need help with anything we are here to share our knowledge.

butterbean

I think the save feature is of upmost importance, especially if Gendai Games is releasing their own titles, I would think they would want a save feature implemented in their games, which brings me to this question, is GG making their own titles soley by use of GameSalad or are they utilizing some other programs as well?

superNES

Nope, nothing under our sleeves! We use GameSalad from start to finish.

Vanny_Arts

Well,,, about the 10 mbs limit,,,, I think apple needs to raise those numbers since the iphone/ipod are getting faster,bigger,brighter and yes powerful. but the designer or developer needs to learn how to make their games as smallest as possible with the appropriate and correct way. It should be tutorials in this site for the un-experience since GS is made for the 99% of people like me =D

JGary321

I agree the limit does need to be raised, but it's ATT not Apple that is limiting it. Apple couldn't care less how big it is, it's running off ATT's bandwidth. ATT is forcing Apple to limit it. I do really hope they will raise it eventually though.

eric_summers

There is no limit for iPhone games made with GameSalad right? I think the 10MB limit is for games that are hosted for free on the web. Apple has a 2 GB limit for apps, but they reserve the right to deny an app if they don't think they can support it. A 2GB 0.99 app might get rejected. I don't see where AT&T fits in to this picture.

I would also like to see horizontal and vertical flips. Automatic or manual texture atlas support would be nice too. I see flips implemented as a Graphic attribute on the actor. This is important to use one animation for an actor to walk right and left.

It would be cool to see behaviors that can be applied to layers to do stuff like parallax scrolling.

I would love to see "struct" attributes. Custom events that can carry an attribute would be cool too. I'd like to see "functions", but I think that is what "My Behaviors" is intended to be when it is finished.

+1 for save game management too.

eric_summers

Oh... "My Behaviors" stores rules. I get it now.

It would still be nice to see functions where you could put placeholder variables in. That way you can change the function and the instances of it get changed automatically.