Preset behaviors for specific game types?

Dark Tiki Studios

I am the newest-of-the-new when it comes to GameSalad (and I'm excited to be here!), and I have a simple question: Does Gamesalad have preset behaviors (that can be applied to actors) for specific game types? In Construct 2 (which I was using previously), if you wanted to make an actor work with a platformer, you clicked the "Platformer" behavior, applied it to the actor, and that was it. You could adjust the specific settings of each attribute if you wanted, but without any tweaking your actor would have platformer movement (including jumping) with two easy mouse clicks. Construct 2 also had similar preset movements for racing games, 8-way movement (for top-down games), bullet (projectiles), etc.

Does Gamesalad have anything similar, or do i have to piece together movement for every actor through the use of many individual behaviors? This seems to be the case based upon the posts and videos i can find, but I wanted to ask, because this would represent a huge amount of extra time it would take to get actors functioning compared to C2. I moved to Gamesalad because I was tired of having to boot to Windows on my Mac to use C2, but now I'm concerned it's going to take much longer to make games in Gamesalad if it doesn't have this functionality. If it is true that I have to build an actor's movement piece-by-piece, can I copy-and-paste that movement to other actors once it's assembled? Thanks for your time!

jamie_c

There are no 'preset behaviors for game types' but honestly once you get the hang of how Gamesalads behaviors work you can whip stuff together super fast. Just take the time up front to learn the basics and you'll be good to go.

Also there are lots of tutorials and templates available that will already have a lot of built in functionality you can pick up and customize as needed. I have a bunch of platformer focused tutorials at my website, linked in my signature below, if that is specifically something you are interested in creating with GS.

Welcome and have fun learning!

tatiang

No, GameSalad does not have game-specific behaviors or rules. There are, however, many templates, demos, and video tutorials that will show you how to do just about anything you need. I always start by Googling gamesalad [term] where [term] is anything from save high scores to platformer to tilt controls. If I'm still stuck at that point, I post a question on the forums. The forums has a powerful search engine as well.

And yes, you can absolutely re-use code. The easiest way is to simply duplicate the actor in the Inspector or on the scene. But GameSalad also supports copying and pasting of rules and behaviors.

Dark Tiki Studios

Well, not exactly what I was hoping for, but thanks for the info! Perhaps those kind of game-specific behaviors can be included in Graphene? They really do speed development.

tatiang

My sense of Graphene is that it's more open-ended (people can script their own plug-ins) and less packaged so the likelihood is low, but I don't know for sure. I suppose people could more easily code something along the lines of what you're looking for and provide it as an add-on. That's pretty much true already with GameSalad, though, since templates provide just that. But I know what you're saying - it would be nice to have those pre-made settings already included.