And thank YOU filemaplegames for the info about sprite instances, I'll look into that closer as I wasn't aware that capability was available.
I also heavily agree with everyone about not including iAds right now. If its a strategic business need to add a new feature to the next release, I can understand that, but please put as may resources as you can on improving the base product.
My vote for new features would be adding GameCenter first, then in App purchases. The App Store game category is a highly competitve marketplace, and most of the 2D games that GS users need to compete with have implemented one of the social game network libs like OpenFeint. It would be to our advantage if we could easily integrate GameCenter features as well.
As for adding full blown scripting support, I mainly mention this because I've been frustrated with the klunky methods currently available for implementing complex logic. We basically only have rules, which are pretty much just an "if/else" statement. I would be rather happy if you provided the ability to add more complex logic quickly. Although it would be nice if there was some way to implement custom functions for the expression editor, or to build custom actions, and then share them with the GS user community. A few more ideas:
1. Add the ability to use logic operators more freely in the expression editor or in rule definitions, like logical AND, OR, and NOT. 2. Add an equivalent of a select/switch statement, so we don't have to resort to complex nested Rules which likely don't execute quickly and quickly fill up the editor and render slowly. I realize that GS is kind of a hybrid state machine, but even a less cluttered visual "syntax" would be nice.
... but mostly, please, for the sake of all that is Holy, fix the stability problems! ;-)
I do want to mention again that I am not trying to be critical, I *am* truly excited about the potential of GameSalad for iOS app development. I think you guys have a great idea that opens up the iOS platform for more creative people to experiment and advance our favorite mobile technology.. and even with the crashes I have been stubbornly working with the product because its simply such a fast, (usually) fun, way to explore my own ideas. I have also been developing some of our ideas using cocos2D for iPhone using Xcode, but I can put things together so much more quickly with GameSalad, so I am behind GS 100%!
Woah im surprised at the almost bashing that is being handed out towards Gendai .... When the 'big picture' was released and it was stated that there would be no more new features and that it was focusing on stability etc it was widely criticised due to the lack of new features! Now they release the next edition and say they're looking into adding new features, its again criticised because of the lack of stability. I guess its more to do with the different levels of users, there maybe a lot of 'amateur' devs so therefore want all the new features and can put up with the crashing, whilst others would like nothing more than to see the tool being tightened up and added to.
To me, i cant really prioritise! I really want the tool more stable, it is annoying when it crashes and slows down, or having to wait a lot longer to open an actor with a heavy rule set! I also want to be able to compete, with all the new features coming with ios4, plus the things we've been missing for a while, online leaderboards, pause etc, the consumer base will be expecting these things in our games! Everyone has their own opinion on it and im sure Gendai are trying to work on both in unison, we just need to keep supporting them, be polite about what we'd like to see and more definitely, just need to be patient.
I love their updates, when i see the box pop up its so exciting and some updates have been great whilst others a little disappointing. They are addressing things though and the reduction in load time was a massive achievement in this latest release, the tool is more stable but that memory leak is really crippling and they must realise this has to be fixed by the time they reach 1.0, the sooner the better.
Thats my opinion on this matter, they will have a vision for 1.0 that they will want to achieve, im sure they want to improve the tool and add the fancy features, the main problem behind all of this from their point of view will be the old saying, no matter what they do "You cant please everyone"
@beefy_clyro: I am in the pretty much the exact same position as you on these issues, and I do want to apologize if my posts appeared to be bashing Gendai, its wasn't my intention to criticize or bash them on anything at all. Frankly, I have to admit I just realized I made a mistake: I didn't look close enough and I assumed that the original post and the poll were initiated by a Gendai employee. I was under the mistaken impression that they were directly reaching out to ask the community to vote on new features, which surprised me due to the existing issues with GS.
Regardless, even if it was originally posted by Gendai, I still didn't mean to come off overly critical. I definately support the work they are doing, and I sincerely hope a new release is coming with much improved stability and usability.
Frankly, the project we are currently developing has fallen behind schedule due mainly to the stability issues in the Creator tool. This is quite frustrating as we originally chose to take the risk of using GameSalad on this project because we believed it would allow us to bring it to market quickly. A week ago we started to rebuild the project concurrently using cocos2d and Xcode because we have started to worry if we could complete it successfully using GS.
Fortunately, we (OrganicaMachina) are only an indie side-project of everyone involved. Of course, I fully realize that GS isn't even at a 1.0 release level yet, and I don't expect it to be more than a beta product at the moment. It's the very nature of being an indie shop that allows us to experiment with iOS dev tools in the first place.
I'm just so damn excited about the possibilities I see in GS at the moment. Most of the experimental projects we have in the pipeline could ultimately be almost trivial to implement using GS, and we could crank them out at an amazing rate when the product matures! That is really cool, and I guess I am rather impatient to use GS as our primary tool... and that's a very positive thing to say about GS and Gendai!
Anyway, I agree with you. I'm sure that Gendai's users are likely split between the two extremes of amateur developers and/or less technical creative types and the more advanced professional software engineers, and that would definately cause contention regarding the argument of features vs. maintenance.
I'd never heard of GameSalad until recently. As a matter of fact, our little indie "studio" might not have discovered GS if it hadn't been for the GS splash screen we all saw when we started playing "Asplosion", a rather well-designed game I have been impressed with.
I've actually been scratching my head now since we began using GS, wondering how patient the "Asplosion" developer must have been to implement a game with something like, I think, 80 levels! It would have taken a pretty good chunk of time to build that game using one of the other iOS game engines alone, then add in all the horrendous stability issues (the mem leak you refer to) and the poor ruleset rendering. It must have been excellent Zen-full-like practice while building that game, or the developer already had Buddha-like patience and self-control! If they could do it, we must be able as well, so that's why we haven't dropped GS yet!
How do you deal with the stability issues? How do you minimize them? We have been putting our project data into a subversion repo in case CS loses any of our work, and I've been restarting GS at the very first sign of off behavior, especially at the first sign of UI lag.
P.S. - I realize I am likely overly verbose when I post... I'll try to keep my posts shorter so it's not like reading a tome everytime I post something. For those of you that slogged through my previous posts regardless of their length, thank you for your time and respect! ;-)
The real easy solution to all the disappointments inherent in GameSalad is to lay off adding new features until the editor is fully functional and not a bugfest that challenges the user to remember the workarounds.
Concentrate on that for a few months.
In the mean time, we are all falling behind marketing wise, since we can't support reasonable features like inApp purchasing, iAds, GameCenter, Pause, Social Networking, and a bunch of other things that will start pissing Apple off shortly, if we do not have them in our apps.
Right now Apple is telling me that "minimal user functionality" is why they are lately declining apps. Apple suggests that since the limitation is in GameSalad, I should not be using it, but should try directly coding in XCode, where these functions are easily implemented.
It's true.
These functions ARE easily implemented in XCode. Maybe a page or two of modular code that can easily be appended. Remember, XCode is Object Oriented, so it does not have to be like pulling teeth to add new functions. Tack them on and they are there to be invoked.
The other side of the story is that lots of what GameSalad does so well is not so easily done by "rolling your own". GameSalad is a great RADD (Rapid Application Development & Deployment) tool. As far as it has been developed to be, it can implement specific game related code easily.
So maybe if GameSalad concentrated on what it was good at, and delivered source code to its user base who was interested in taking it further, you'd have a winner. Remember that GameSalad users are a subset of XCode users, not the other way around.
What is the real reason that Gendai can't simply deliver XCode Source to the developers who have developed it in a 4GL UI?
It can't be confidentiality, since that is easily handled with NDA agreements. Same with exclusivity, and product branding. Simple contract clauses handle that.
Speaking of contracts, how much longer do you think Apple will allow GS created apps that deprive their users of new and exciting features? I don't really want to see GameSalad end up like Adobe Flash... Supporting the full feature set is why the clause was added into the Apple Developer Agreement.
Read 3.3.1 again and you'll see that Apple wants to ensure that applications on the Apple mobile platform look different from other platforms and make use of the unique features of the platform, and “lowest common denominator applications” water down the value of the Apple products. The overall intention is for Apple to control the value chain and dictate what the Apple experience is and not leave it to third parties.
We are skating on really thin ice when we do not allow implementation of the most important new features that set the iOS apart. Apple may shut GameSalad down and force the issue.
Please.
Consider making the source code available, to those GameSalad users who'd like to help GameSalad stay on the "approved partners list".
Concentrate on improving the core functionality of GameSalad, and don't relegate GameSalad apps to being rejected de facto for limited ability, when that ability is so easy to add to the source code.
I like many of your thoughts. I might suggest that many of your issues are something I too have wrestled with for many months.
I have a project I have spent 2 months on and am about 85% complete with and have shelved it because it won't run on a 3G or an iPod due to the bloated game engine using 40% of the available RAM for older devices. However...I think our saving grace will be the 3G will be obsolete within 6 months and Gendai will get a pass indirectly.
Right now I think GameSalad is ideal for what I call "Taptard" games that require basic interaction. If you get too much going on, the game engine starts to drag, stutter and bog down if not crash. The graphics engine just isn't polished yet either and I am hoping that Gendai continues as you suggest, to improve and polish what they have rather than introduce new features.
I don't think iAds will make a bad game profitable for anyone. I believe that if you have a good game concept and a polished look, you have a good shot at minor successes. I just don't think GameSalad is capable of supporting TOP 200 caliber games consistently...there just isn't enough meat to it yet and its probably another year away before its robust enough to take on more complex concepts...but by then...who knows what the standard will be on the appstore.
I do think in-app purchasing would be a HUGE asset as it will allow us to keep titles at $0.99 and build on successful title via this element...which seems to be a key way the top performers are raking in the big profits...by selling expansion packs within a basic free or cheap base mod.
We have found GS to be a nice companion to our development toolkit. We are producing native apps and are taking a close look at Corona due to the inherent limitations GS (and Gendai's slow dev schedule). But GS will be my personal go to software for now since I am the least versed "coder" on our dev team and anything I can produce independently adds icing to the bottomline so to speak.
GS is ideal for non-code oriented devs to get their feet wet in app development. But its definitely like working with one hand tied behind your back. It just seems really cumbersome at times to get what you want to happen. And debugging is often brain numbing...not to mention the dev platform's buggy nature and inherent memory leaks.
My suggestion is to keep with GS and use it for the experimental basic game concepts. Any concepts needing robust physics or rendering support - you may want to consider another platform such as Corona or Unity. In short...its taptards or nothing I have found.
_______________________
*** visit www.spiritApps.com to check out the Spirit Connoisseur Apps *** (Rum and Vodka now available for 17+) _______________________
PS: @ TShirtBooth It sounds as though you are off the proverbial GS Kool-aid wagon. Welcome to Kool-aid sobriety. ;-) BTW: How's Star Daze doing these days? Still holding its own?
In App Purchasing is the biggest shortcoming. It can be programmed in about an hour. It's a shame that we cannot use GameSalad for the creative work and add the bells and whistles ourselves.
Good points, all! I do like the idea of building a GS project into a base XCode project and then adding to it. The problem I think with that is that GS projects compile into some proprietary format that can only execute using the GS runtime, and probably wont be practical to build into Obj-C/XCode format for further customization.
Perhaps a better method would be to expose the capability to use Obj-C/XCode to create pluggable modules for GS via a native API that appear as new Actions, Behavoirs, or expression editor functions. That way, Gendai would be able to leverage the skills of the more programming-centric members of the GS community to help build up the feature set of GS itself. They could create a community addons lib on the site so we could all share this stuff with eachother.
If that was the case, then GS would become an excellent toolchain addition as an easier way to use reusable custom or shared modules to "assemble" it all into a cohesive product.
Its also interesting about apps being rejected from the app store due to "minimal user functionality". Frankly, that is good to hear, I'm tired of slogging through all the craptastic apps that have flooded the app store from money grubbing opportunists preying on Apple's customers and turning the AppStore into quite a joke... *gasp*.. AND making it more difficult (for no reason) for serious developers with great projects to gain valuable visibility. I'd much prefer my endless hours of hardwork compete against worthy adversaries on its own merits rather than watching drown in an ocean of less than worthy useless fart apps.
GS's limitations definately DO make it impossible to implement much more than the so called "taptard" (lol!) apps. The lack of any kind of list datatype alone pretty much cuts out wide swaths of popular genre games alone.
BTW, thanks for mentioning this "Corona" product!!!! I just took a long look at it and it looks very interesting. I just picked up the Beta. I'm gonna play with it a few days and see if it fits a good medium between XCode and GS.
I was curious about a couple of things:
@firemaplegames: I just bought your Stunt Squirrels app! Pretty fun little app, works nice and smooth on my iPad! Without mentioning any confidential business info, can you give us a rough idea of how well that app has done in the appstore? Has it performed as well as you expected? Did the time and effort pay off satisfactorily for you? Basically, would you say that building a low-price 2D mobile game for the "iPlatform" is a worthwhile endeavor for small/indie studios?
@pranakhan: Thanks! My first game, Danger Cats!, took 11 days from concept to submission to the App Store. Stunt Squirrels! took 2 weeks from concept to submission to the App Store. The iPad version took a few days to knock out. They have netted me about $20K so far.
Not mind blowing, but certainly an excellent return on a couple of weeks work!
I have been a Flash developer for the past 10 years, so I definitely miss all the things that Flash can do that GameSalad can't do yet...
But I can't really put my finger on it, I just find GameSalad really fun to work with. It reminds me of Flash in the early days. Very limited, but at the same time not limited at all. You just had to think creatively.
And I really love integrated development environments like GameSalad and Flash. I am both an artist and a programmer - I like to work on both at the same time. Almost every other development environment is so distinctly split - you have a bunch of text files, and a folder of images. And to test anything, you have to make builds and put them on the device.
I love the immediacy of scripting languages like Flash and GameSalad, of instantly testing the game. Plus, with the GS Viewer I can instantly test it on the device...
That immediacy lets me noodle around to my heart's content: "Let me try 0.5...no, too slow...how about 0.3?... no, too fast...how about 0.375?...perfect!" Doing that and having to make builds is so tedious and unpleasant.
I do the same thing with the artwork and animations. I have Photoshop and GameSalad open at the same time( I have a 30inch monitor!) and I am constantly chucking in new artwork into the image pane and replacing old graphics.
That is actually one thing that didn't work when I first started using GameSalad. You weren't able to swap images that easily... the new ones wouldn't overwrite the old ones. Now they overwrite and the Actor is updated in the Scene.
It's the little stuff like that I look for in updates. That one little thing sped up my (already fast) dev time tremendously.
Admittedly, GameSalad has one of the quirkiest editors that I've ever used, and some things are really frustrating and tedious, but it keeps getting better and better.
Of all the things that everybody wants, the biggest thing that I hope for is for the window panes and scrollbars to remember their positions when using the back button! I spend so much time resizing windows and scrolling back down to where I was... THAT would save me so much time!
I guess I like programming in 'difficult' environments! Flash is quirky too. And when I started using GameSalad and realized that there wasn't any Arrays!? or any functions? or for loops? Jeez!
Both of my games save and load over 180 Attributes, so definitely a little daunting!
But it just gets you thinking in different ways.
I am doing my best to make the current game that I am working on be my masterpiece. I have spent a month on it so far, hopefully it should be finished in July sometime...
@pranakhan, i know you wasnt bashing and i can see your enthuisiasm towards GS, every release is getting better and better. Firemaple pretty much sums it up in the above post. For a months worth of work Joe has made pretty much $20k, if he was coding in xcode i doubt he'd have the 1st game finished by now! Great work dude and i cant wait to see this new one, any more teasers coming soon?
I'd like to see better editor features, so we can create richer, more complicated games without it being a complete nightmare if you build a level, place everyhthing, then realise you need to modify it.
To me, everything else is secondary. If were not given the tools to build great games, the rest really isnt going to make much difference.
I totally agree on this one. I cant chose any of the poll options as there are so many extra features needed before even thinking of those extra ones that are located int he poll.
@pranakhan, I think you get what I am saying... There is a point at Gendai where our XML gameproj data is turned into "XCode Source", and then compiled into "XCode Object" and then returned to the GS'er who submitted it, as "XCode Object"...
If Gendai could send the "XCode Source" to the GS'er who could then add the functions that Gendai is putting off, before compiling, we actually could develop inApp Purchasing, iAd, GameCenter, Social networking, and all the rest. Taken individually, each of these is a short exercise in coding... What Gendai makes easy is the translation of the core game facilities without having to drudge through build after build (as FireMapleGames says...)
In my case, I am not interested in developing yet another "taptard", "blast the target", or "block-knock" app. I create entertainment apps that need social networking and in-app purchasing. These are subtle entertainment apps, with hidden mechanics that use multitouch gestures, swipes and the accelerometer to provide hidden input in order to create an air of simplicity and openness to the spectator. Subtlety is unfortunately misunderstood by the rating staff at Apple as "minimal user functionality", since using obvious buttons or other usual d-pad devices etc, would ruin the mystery and therefore the intrinsic value of the app.
iAds would frankly benefit all of us, as that'd provide a way to get a free app to the public without completely wasting our time revenue-wise. InApp Purchasing would make impulse buying easy for the user who tried the free app and decided they liked it, and maybe whatever else you had... Likewise GameCenter would be of huge benefit to most of the community who are building games that the buyers want to compete in.
My interest in GameSalad is mostly as an app builder, not so much for collision detection, acceleration, bouncing and the like. So it is frustrating that the developer toolkit does not provide functions I need but still cannot provide a stable environment for working. If we had source code, we could append video playback to it easily as well, and that would be huge!
That is why I think Gendai should find a way to get us our source code, so we can take it the rest of the way to becoming a valuable application. Also I fear that as Gendai fails to provide core iOS functionality that Apple has decided to make available to "ensure the Apple experience", GameSalad will go the way of Flash, and be marooned and relegated to the vanity press bin of development. Provision 3.3.1 in the Apple Developers Contract is pretty clear on this. Why did Flash get cut off? They did not provide features that Apple deemed necessary to the experience. History repeats itself for those who do not learn from it.
"3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."
I think Gendai would be doing us and themselves a favor by coming up with a way to get these new features into apps that have the GameSalad logo. It would go a long way to ensuring that GameSalad did not die on the vine. If Gendai are not creating "XCode Source" from our XML gameproj file and compiling that with the XCode Compiler, then GameSalad is already in violation and the end is nigh.
giacomopoppi said: iAds will grant us a lot more income than if we just sell apps. think about it!!
Yes but if the game won't work on iOS4 all haven't got much sense, I'm working on a Visual Novel with xcode, yesterday I had downloaded the SDK4, buit my app and discovered that some code was deprecated... Lot of people upgrade their device to OS4, iPhone4 will have ONLY iOS4 and a lot of people will buy it...
of course, but im saying people are only getting excited about iads for the money. GS will hopefully get iOS4 ready then incorporate iads. i hope they will focus a bit more on gs......and our needs :P
Comments
And thank YOU filemaplegames for the info about sprite instances, I'll look into that closer as I wasn't aware that capability was available.
I also heavily agree with everyone about not including iAds right now. If its a strategic business need to add a new feature to the next release, I can understand that, but please put as may resources as you can on improving the base product.
My vote for new features would be adding GameCenter first, then in App purchases. The App Store game category is a highly competitve marketplace, and most of the 2D games that GS users need to compete with have implemented one of the social game network libs like OpenFeint. It would be to our advantage if we could easily integrate GameCenter features as well.
As for adding full blown scripting support, I mainly mention this because I've been frustrated with the klunky methods currently available for implementing complex logic. We basically only have rules, which are pretty much just an "if/else" statement. I would be rather happy if you provided the ability to add more complex logic quickly. Although it would be nice if there was some way to implement custom functions for the expression editor, or to build custom actions, and then share them with the GS user community. A few more ideas:
1. Add the ability to use logic operators more freely in the expression editor or in rule definitions, like logical AND, OR, and NOT.
2. Add an equivalent of a select/switch statement, so we don't have to resort to complex nested Rules which likely don't execute quickly and quickly fill up the editor and render slowly. I realize that GS is kind of a hybrid state machine, but even a less cluttered visual "syntax" would be nice.
... but mostly, please, for the sake of all that is Holy, fix the stability problems! ;-)
I do want to mention again that I am not trying to be critical, I *am* truly excited about the potential of GameSalad for iOS app development. I think you guys have a great idea that opens up the iOS platform for more creative people to experiment and advance our favorite mobile technology.. and even with the crashes I have been stubbornly working with the product because its simply such a fast, (usually) fun, way to explore my own ideas. I have also been developing some of our ideas using cocos2D for iPhone using Xcode, but I can put things together so much more quickly with GameSalad, so I am behind GS 100%!
Pranakhan
To me, i cant really prioritise! I really want the tool more stable, it is annoying when it crashes and slows down, or having to wait a lot longer to open an actor with a heavy rule set! I also want to be able to compete, with all the new features coming with ios4, plus the things we've been missing for a while, online leaderboards, pause etc, the consumer base will be expecting these things in our games! Everyone has their own opinion on it and im sure Gendai are trying to work on both in unison, we just need to keep supporting them, be polite about what we'd like to see and more definitely, just need to be patient.
I love their updates, when i see the box pop up its so exciting and some updates have been great whilst others a little disappointing. They are addressing things though and the reduction in load time was a massive achievement in this latest release, the tool is more stable but that memory leak is really crippling and they must realise this has to be fixed by the time they reach 1.0, the sooner the better.
Thats my opinion on this matter, they will have a vision for 1.0 that they will want to achieve, im sure they want to improve the tool and add the fancy features, the main problem behind all of this from their point of view will be the old saying, no matter what they do "You cant please everyone"
Regardless, even if it was originally posted by Gendai, I still didn't mean to come off overly critical. I definately support the work they are doing, and I sincerely hope a new release is coming with much improved stability and usability.
Frankly, the project we are currently developing has fallen behind schedule due mainly to the stability issues in the Creator tool. This is quite frustrating as we originally chose to take the risk of using GameSalad on this project because we believed it would allow us to bring it to market quickly. A week ago we started to rebuild the project concurrently using cocos2d and Xcode because we have started to worry if we could complete it successfully using GS.
Fortunately, we (OrganicaMachina) are only an indie side-project of everyone involved. Of course, I fully realize that GS isn't even at a 1.0 release level yet, and I don't expect it to be more than a beta product at the moment. It's the very nature of being an indie shop that allows us to experiment with iOS dev tools in the first place.
I'm just so damn excited about the possibilities I see in GS at the moment. Most of the experimental projects we have in the pipeline could ultimately be almost trivial to implement using GS, and we could crank them out at an amazing rate when the product matures! That is really cool, and I guess I am rather impatient to use GS as our primary tool... and that's a very positive thing to say about GS and Gendai!
Anyway, I agree with you. I'm sure that Gendai's users are likely split between the two extremes of amateur developers and/or less technical creative types and the more advanced professional software engineers, and that would definately cause contention regarding the argument of features vs. maintenance.
I'd never heard of GameSalad until recently. As a matter of fact, our little indie "studio" might not have discovered GS if it hadn't been for the GS splash screen we all saw when we started playing "Asplosion", a rather well-designed game I have been impressed with.
I've actually been scratching my head now since we began using GS, wondering how patient the "Asplosion" developer must have been to implement a game with something like, I think, 80 levels! It would have taken a pretty good chunk of time to build that game using one of the other iOS game engines alone, then add in all the horrendous stability issues (the mem leak you refer to) and the poor ruleset rendering. It must have been excellent Zen-full-like practice while building that game, or the developer already had Buddha-like patience and self-control! If they could do it, we must be able as well, so that's why we haven't dropped GS yet!
How do you deal with the stability issues? How do you minimize them? We have been putting our project data into a subversion repo in case CS loses any of our work, and I've been restarting GS at the very first sign of off behavior, especially at the first sign of UI lag.
Keep up the good work Gendai!
Concentrate on that for a few months.
In the mean time, we are all falling behind marketing wise, since we can't support reasonable features like inApp purchasing, iAds, GameCenter, Pause, Social Networking, and a bunch of other things that will start pissing Apple off shortly, if we do not have them in our apps.
Right now Apple is telling me that "minimal user functionality" is why they are lately declining apps. Apple suggests that since the limitation is in GameSalad, I should not be using it, but should try directly coding in XCode, where these functions are easily implemented.
It's true.
These functions ARE easily implemented in XCode. Maybe a page or two of modular code that can easily be appended. Remember, XCode is Object Oriented, so it does not have to be like pulling teeth to add new functions. Tack them on and they are there to be invoked.
The other side of the story is that lots of what GameSalad does so well is not so easily done by "rolling your own". GameSalad is a great RADD (Rapid Application Development & Deployment) tool. As far as it has been developed to be, it can implement specific game related code easily.
So maybe if GameSalad concentrated on what it was good at, and delivered source code to its user base who was interested in taking it further, you'd have a winner. Remember that GameSalad users are a subset of XCode users, not the other way around.
What is the real reason that Gendai can't simply deliver XCode Source to the developers who have developed it in a 4GL UI?
It can't be confidentiality, since that is easily handled with NDA agreements. Same with exclusivity, and product branding. Simple contract clauses handle that.
Speaking of contracts, how much longer do you think Apple will allow GS created apps that deprive their users of new and exciting features? I don't really want to see GameSalad end up like Adobe Flash... Supporting the full feature set is why the clause was added into the Apple Developer Agreement.
Read 3.3.1 again and you'll see that Apple wants to ensure that applications on the Apple mobile platform look different from other platforms and make use of the unique features of the platform, and “lowest common denominator applications” water down the value of the Apple products. The overall intention is for Apple to control the value chain and dictate what the Apple experience is and not leave it to third parties.
We are skating on really thin ice when we do not allow implementation of the most important new features that set the iOS apart. Apple may shut GameSalad down and force the issue.
Please.
Consider making the source code available, to those GameSalad users who'd like to help GameSalad stay on the "approved partners list".
Concentrate on improving the core functionality of GameSalad, and don't relegate GameSalad apps to being rejected de facto for limited ability, when that ability is so easy to add to the source code.
Think about it?
I like many of your thoughts. I might suggest that many of your issues are something I too have wrestled with for many months.
I have a project I have spent 2 months on and am about 85% complete with and have shelved it because it won't run on a 3G or an iPod due to the bloated game engine using 40% of the available RAM for older devices. However...I think our saving grace will be the 3G will be obsolete within 6 months and Gendai will get a pass indirectly.
Right now I think GameSalad is ideal for what I call "Taptard" games that require basic interaction. If you get too much going on, the game engine starts to drag, stutter and bog down if not crash. The graphics engine just isn't polished yet either and I am hoping that Gendai continues as you suggest, to improve and polish what they have rather than introduce new features.
I don't think iAds will make a bad game profitable for anyone. I believe that if you have a good game concept and a polished look, you have a good shot at minor successes. I just don't think GameSalad is capable of supporting TOP 200 caliber games consistently...there just isn't enough meat to it yet and its probably another year away before its robust enough to take on more complex concepts...but by then...who knows what the standard will be on the appstore.
I do think in-app purchasing would be a HUGE asset as it will allow us to keep titles at $0.99 and build on successful title via this element...which seems to be a key way the top performers are raking in the big profits...by selling expansion packs within a basic free or cheap base mod.
We have found GS to be a nice companion to our development toolkit. We are producing native apps and are taking a close look at Corona due to the inherent limitations GS (and Gendai's slow dev schedule). But GS will be my personal go to software for now since I am the least versed "coder" on our dev team and anything I can produce independently adds icing to the bottomline so to speak.
GS is ideal for non-code oriented devs to get their feet wet in app development. But its definitely like working with one hand tied behind your back. It just seems really cumbersome at times to get what you want to happen. And debugging is often brain numbing...not to mention the dev platform's buggy nature and inherent memory leaks.
My suggestion is to keep with GS and use it for the experimental basic game concepts. Any concepts needing robust physics or rendering support - you may want to consider another platform such as Corona or Unity. In short...its taptards or nothing I have found.
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It sounds as though you are off the proverbial GS Kool-aid wagon. Welcome to Kool-aid sobriety. ;-)
BTW: How's Star Daze doing these days? Still holding its own?
Good points, all! I do like the idea of building a GS project into a base XCode project and then adding to it. The problem I think with that is that GS projects compile into some proprietary format that can only execute using the GS runtime, and probably wont be practical to build into Obj-C/XCode format for further customization.
Perhaps a better method would be to expose the capability to use Obj-C/XCode to create pluggable modules for GS via a native API that appear as new Actions, Behavoirs, or expression editor functions. That way, Gendai would be able to leverage the skills of the more programming-centric members of the GS community to help build up the feature set of GS itself. They could create a community addons lib on the site so we could all share this stuff with eachother.
If that was the case, then GS would become an excellent toolchain addition as an easier way to use reusable custom or shared modules to "assemble" it all into a cohesive product.
Its also interesting about apps being rejected from the app store due to "minimal user functionality". Frankly, that is good to hear, I'm tired of slogging through all the craptastic apps that have flooded the app store from money grubbing opportunists preying on Apple's customers and turning the AppStore into quite a joke... *gasp*.. AND making it more difficult (for no reason) for serious developers with great projects to gain valuable visibility. I'd much prefer my endless hours of hardwork compete against worthy adversaries on its own merits rather than watching drown in an ocean of less than worthy useless fart apps.
GS's limitations definately DO make it impossible to implement much more than the so called "taptard" (lol!) apps. The lack of any kind of list datatype alone pretty much cuts out wide swaths of popular genre games alone.
BTW, thanks for mentioning this "Corona" product!!!! I just took a long look at it and it looks very interesting. I just picked up the Beta. I'm gonna play with it a few days and see if it fits a good medium between XCode and GS.
I was curious about a couple of things:
@firemaplegames: I just bought your Stunt Squirrels app! Pretty fun little app, works nice and smooth on my iPad! Without mentioning any confidential business info, can you give us a rough idea of how well that app has done in the appstore? Has it performed as well as you expected? Did the time and effort pay off satisfactorily for you? Basically, would you say that building a low-price 2D mobile game for the "iPlatform" is a worthwhile endeavor for small/indie studios?
This has been a great thread guys! Thank you!
Not mind blowing, but certainly an excellent return on a couple of weeks work!
I have been a Flash developer for the past 10 years, so I definitely miss all the things that Flash can do that GameSalad can't do yet...
But I can't really put my finger on it, I just find GameSalad really fun to work with. It reminds me of Flash in the early days. Very limited, but at the same time not limited at all. You just had to think creatively.
And I really love integrated development environments like GameSalad and Flash. I am both an artist and a programmer - I like to work on both at the same time. Almost every other development environment is so distinctly split - you have a bunch of text files, and a folder of images. And to test anything, you have to make builds and put them on the device.
I love the immediacy of scripting languages like Flash and GameSalad, of instantly testing the game. Plus, with the GS Viewer I can instantly test it on the device...
That immediacy lets me noodle around to my heart's content: "Let me try 0.5...no, too slow...how about 0.3?... no, too fast...how about 0.375?...perfect!" Doing that and having to make builds is so tedious and unpleasant.
I do the same thing with the artwork and animations. I have Photoshop and GameSalad open at the same time( I have a 30inch monitor!) and I am constantly chucking in new artwork into the image pane and replacing old graphics.
That is actually one thing that didn't work when I first started using GameSalad. You weren't able to swap images that easily... the new ones wouldn't overwrite the old ones. Now they overwrite and the Actor is updated in the Scene.
It's the little stuff like that I look for in updates. That one little thing sped up my (already fast) dev time tremendously.
Admittedly, GameSalad has one of the quirkiest editors that I've ever used, and some things are really frustrating and tedious, but it keeps getting better and better.
Of all the things that everybody wants, the biggest thing that I hope for is for the window panes and scrollbars to remember their positions when using the back button! I spend so much time resizing windows and scrolling back down to where I was... THAT would save me so much time!
I guess I like programming in 'difficult' environments! Flash is quirky too. And when I started using GameSalad and realized that there wasn't any Arrays!? or any functions? or for loops? Jeez!
Both of my games save and load over 180 Attributes, so definitely a little daunting!
But it just gets you thinking in different ways.
I am doing my best to make the current game that I am working on be my masterpiece. I have spent a month on it so far, hopefully it should be finished in July sometime...
Firemaple pretty much sums it up in the above post. For a months worth of work Joe has made pretty much $20k, if he was coding in xcode i doubt he'd have the 1st game finished by now! Great work dude and i cant wait to see this new one, any more teasers coming soon?
If Gendai could send the "XCode Source" to the GS'er who could then add the functions that Gendai is putting off, before compiling, we actually could develop inApp Purchasing, iAd, GameCenter, Social networking, and all the rest. Taken individually, each of these is a short exercise in coding... What Gendai makes easy is the translation of the core game facilities without having to drudge through build after build (as FireMapleGames says...)
In my case, I am not interested in developing yet another "taptard", "blast the target", or "block-knock" app. I create entertainment apps that need social networking and in-app purchasing. These are subtle entertainment apps, with hidden mechanics that use multitouch gestures, swipes and the accelerometer to provide hidden input in order to create an air of simplicity and openness to the spectator. Subtlety is unfortunately misunderstood by the rating staff at Apple as "minimal user functionality", since using obvious buttons or other usual d-pad devices etc, would ruin the mystery and therefore the intrinsic value of the app.
iAds would frankly benefit all of us, as that'd provide a way to get a free app to the public without completely wasting our time revenue-wise. InApp Purchasing would make impulse buying easy for the user who tried the free app and decided they liked it, and maybe whatever else you had... Likewise GameCenter would be of huge benefit to most of the community who are building games that the buyers want to compete in.
My interest in GameSalad is mostly as an app builder, not so much for collision detection, acceleration, bouncing and the like. So it is frustrating that the developer toolkit does not provide functions I need but still cannot provide a stable environment for working. If we had source code, we could append video playback to it easily as well, and that would be huge!
That is why I think Gendai should find a way to get us our source code, so we can take it the rest of the way to becoming a valuable application. Also I fear that as Gendai fails to provide core iOS functionality that Apple has decided to make available to "ensure the Apple experience", GameSalad will go the way of Flash, and be marooned and relegated to the vanity press bin of development. Provision 3.3.1 in the Apple Developers Contract is pretty clear on this. Why did Flash get cut off? They did not provide features that Apple deemed necessary to the experience. History repeats itself for those who do not learn from it.
"3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."
I think Gendai would be doing us and themselves a favor by coming up with a way to get these new features into apps that have the GameSalad logo. It would go a long way to ensuring that GameSalad did not die on the vine. If Gendai are not creating "XCode Source" from our XML gameproj file and compiling that with the XCode Compiler, then GameSalad is already in violation and the end is nigh.
After all GameSalad is a game engine
And if it helps any, I voted for twitter integration. But I'm more than happy to have vote count towards GameCentre to level things up a little
QS
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Lot of people upgrade their device to OS4, iPhone4 will have ONLY iOS4 and a lot of people will buy it...
GS will hopefully get iOS4 ready then incorporate iads.
i hope they will focus a bit more on gs......and our needs :P