Very disappointing game design experience!

WyrmfireWyrmfire Member, PRO Posts: 5
edited July 2015 in Working with GS (Mac)

I just signed up for GameSalad PRO for Mac tonight and am already tearing my hair out with frustration.

I was expecting a game development environment and bought a "toy" instead!

Considering I just signed up and paid $29 USD (per month I might add!) for the privilege of what is essentially a very-much featureless application, I'm pretty annoyed and just feel cheated.

The capabilities of this application make it "half baked" in my opinion and really don't have the feature-set one would expect from a fully fledged game design platform.

Yes, there may be a lot of functions and its supposed to be designed to be "code less" though c'mon, is it really that hard to chop up a tile set into pre-defined pieces and add snap-to features.

Even the cross-platform type arrangement doesn't make up for it as you need to be able to efficiently design the game first to ever be able to publish it. Seems like the developers thought of the end-goal and forgot about the purpose of the application, with that being to "design" the game or application.

There is no snap-to grid where tiles can be lined up and there is no way to load full tile sets to enable ease of drag 'n' drop of tile areas when designing.

There is also no view settings to add layers manually (there is a Send to Front, send to back, etc. though this is hardly what I'd call organised and doesn't allow you to switch things on and off so you can build layers within the game).

I did read that four years ago someone made a comment about "we're working on adding in loading of tile sets" and that was it, four years later, nothing.

It has literally taken me half an hour tonight to line up about 10 different 16x16 tile squares on a iPhone 5 screen. Snap-to, I could have finished the whole screen by now.

If I can make one candid suggestion, how about being able to load a tile set, allows the designer to choose the size of their tiles (e.g. 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, etc) and have a mouse-drag over the loaded tile set that lets you select multiples of that size tile from where the mouse click is held down until release (e.g. you've now selected 16 lots of the 16x16 tiles from 2 tiles in and 4 tiles down so you can select a whole tree, instead of having to piece together 20 pieces of a tree manually from a tile set that needed to be cut up into little pieces to allow for import).

I can't even find a way to zoom in and out on the screen when in design mode so my 16x16 tiles look minuscule and are virtually impossible to line up.

Honestly I've seen tile map applications written by programming students in Java that have a better feature-set than that provided by GameSalad and that's saying something.

Not very impressed and rather more frustrated as hell from the experience.

Cancelling my subscription already, which lasted the grand sum of one day.

What a waste of money!

Christian

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Comments

  • Braydon_SFXBraydon_SFX Member, Sous Chef, Bowlboy Sidekick Posts: 9,273

    Hey Christian,

    So it seems that mostly you're upset because GameSalad doesn't have the ability to load in tile sets. That sure would be nice - but have you checked out the other things in GameSalad that makes this tool unique? Is the absence of tile sets really putting you off that much?

    You can add layers manually, you need to go into the Scene tab in the Inspector and click the Layers tab.

  • KevinCrossKevinCross London, UKMember Posts: 1,894

    Whenever I work with grids (I do love working on projects that use grids) I would use a loop to spawn the actors into the correct position. I'd never manually place them on the screen, that would drive me crazy, like it is you.

    You can't put a loop inside a loop like every other single language going (possibly) but you can still create a grid with the one loop.

  • ChunkypixelsChunkypixels Member Posts: 1,114
    edited July 2015

    Theres workarounds... but they don't change the fact that we've been SCREAMING out for standard editor features like snap to grid, multiple copy and paste of actors, and better layer controls for actors for 5 years now...

    They've been promised many times over... and many excuses given...

    So the guy is justified in his findings, and his opinions, with regards to the points he makes... those tools/features really need to be implemented if GameSalad is ever going to be taken as a serious game development tool.

    It frustrates me immensely, that such basic interface elements are forever being sidelined, as its things like this that continue to hold GameSalad back from being a truly outstanding development tool... and they're improvements and features that will benefit each and every single user of the software.

    So the guy has every right to express his views... he's paid after all...

  • KevinCrossKevinCross London, UKMember Posts: 1,894

    @Chunkypixels said:
    So the guy has every right to express his views... he's paid after all...

    I don't think anyone was saying he couldn't express his views or going against him for doing so. Was just suggesting workarounds. Something you have to do a lot with GameSalad.

    I pulled my hair out many of times working on it while it was free so yeah I feel his pain.

  • ClockClock Member Posts: 308

    welcome to the gamesald design environment.

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,369

    I understand that the reason for this is that it's extremely difficult to adapt the current interface to implement these features.

    However, @Manto has shown that it really isn't the same kind of challenge to create a separate app that acts as a scene editor and layout tool, that could be launched from within creator. A "Scene editor" button or something. I can't imagine putting something like that together would be that much of a challenge. Sync the changes back to the XML files and hop back into Creator to continue. Creator is for rough strokes layout, or jump into the GameSalad Scene Editor app for precise and flexible editing.

    @BlackCloakGS @CodeWizard ?

    You guys must be getting so fed up with being tagged in things right now.

  • WyrmfireWyrmfire Member, PRO Posts: 5
    edited July 2015

    Thanks for your feedback, guys and sorry for my rant! Just frustrated that what was delivered is not quite what I would consider to be fully-fledged when designing an app.

    There's no denying, as I mentioned above, that the idea of cross-platform publishing is certainly desirable and should certainly be a long-term expectation given that it reduces development time overall rather than having to keep separate code-bases for all of the different platforms.

    With that being said though, RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools have been around for twenty years (look at Omnis 5 and 7 for example and you'll see what I mean in that it can develop apps for MacOS, Windows, Linux, etc and has been able to since the 90's).

    One quick example of what I would consider a "real editor", though admittedly it is really designed solely to make tile maps is www.mapeditor.org. They write this for free and it has all the features I mentioned for tile set design, with a version written for all OSes as well (Java, PC, MacOSX, Linux).

    This Map Editor is something similar to what I "hoped" I was buying in GameSalad for the interface part of it.

    Anyway, never mind, GameSalad is not really suitable to my needs though I guess I can use MapEditor to do my maps, export them and load finished maps into GameSalad then put the sprites I want to be animated on top of the "one piece" map.

    I really would hope to see this functionality built into GameSalad as it really is a MUST, especially where building "tile set" type games and would make workflow that much better.

    Thankyou for the ideas regarding the loops to bring everything into line and whilst it might work, it will be very cumbersome to do this way, especially when I'm working with 16x16 pixel sized squares. Like I said, it will take me a hour to piece together a tree unless I manually cut up just the trees, having all different sized sprites. The good thing about tile sets as a whole (rather than individual tiles) is they can be loaded once then called upon and they can be organised easily.

    Is there some kind of reference library that all sprites can be "crunched" down into within GameSalad, e.g. something similar to how games like DarkAges (www.darkages.com) and RagnarokOnline files are organised (essentially like a .DAT file that has all sprites in it in an organised format?) This is something I'd prefer to have if possible rather than everything "floating" around loosely.

    Thanks for the input.

    Regards,

    Christian

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,369

    Out of interest, why do you need such tiny tiles? Filling a screen with 16x16 tiles is going to bring with it a whole raft of other problems, performance being the biggest of them.

  • WyrmfireWyrmfire Member, PRO Posts: 5

    All of my tile sets are around this size as they are Ultima-clone style, hence the reason I don't want to cut them all up and would prefer to be able to load a single sheet per load with references to them in-program based on coords; a single sheet loaded at the start with coord references telling what bits of what to put where will load far faster than loading lots and lots of little files and piecing it together, so yes, the way I'm going to have to do it, unless, per my previous post, I edit a finished map and load it as a single piece and then only have the animated sprites loaded individually, will definitely cause performance problems.

  • ChunkypixelsChunkypixels Member Posts: 1,114
    edited July 2015

    @Armelline no matter how bad the underlying code is under the hood of Creator, I just don't believe that it truly can be so bad that its virtually impossible to modify it so that we can have snap to grid, or multiple select and move of actors.... not after 5 years...

    The basic code/implementation for moving and placing actors is already there... we use it every time we use the editor... it just needs some work.

    Ive worked alongside scores of engine and tools programmers over the years... who have built/maintained various in-house game engines and editors and yes, they can often be heard lamenting the messy code of previous developers on a project, but Ive never, ever seen one who point blankly refused to do something as being impossible, due to how the existing code is structured.

    They either dig in, and figure it out, or they pull out a whole chunk of code and rewrite it. And its never taken any programmer I know more than a couple of days to modify a tool to have a snap to grid... let alone 5 years.

    So nope... I just don't buy the argument that the much requested interface tools/improvements can not be implemented under the current codebase... they've had 5 years. Even if it took a coder a solid month to do them, then it would have been worth it.

    If it is so bad... then why has the decision been made to carry on with it, and discontinue development on what was touted as being a much better/cleaner product. It just doesn't make sense...

    Like I said, I just don't buy the argument that the underlying codebase of GameSalad is the unusable mess that we're led to believe.... :neutral:

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,369

    @Chunkypixels said:
    So nope... I just don't buy the argument that none of the much requested interface tools/improvements can be implemented under the current codebase... they've had 5 years. Even if it took a coder a solid month to do them, then it would have been worth it.

    I don't buy it either, I'm just highlighting that even if it is true there are ways around the problem.

  • WebWarriorWebWarrior Member, PRO Posts: 62

    It's not so much that it's too hard to do. It's just that we have bigger fish to fry in terms of stability, feature parity, and engine features (which are easier to implement than Creator features since we only have to build them in one codebase).

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,369
    edited July 2015

    @WebWarrior said:
    It's not so much that it's too hard to do. It's just that we have bigger fish to fry in terms of stability, feature parity, and engine features (which are easier to implement than Creator features since we only have to build them in one codebase).

    Extremely basic layout tools are a pretty big feature imho. The only bigger fish to fry, other than stability, is custom fonts. At least in my opinion.

    I'd like to see better layout tools before custom collision shapes, even.

    Last week I was needing to lay out blocks that are recycled for a scrolling table-driven game. I needed 36 blocks to cover the scene, and then 36 more overlaying those, and 36 more overlaying those. It was a one-time setup, with everything else being driven by the logic. Spawning them was not a viable option. It took me hours to lay out those blocks. With even rudimentary layout tools, or even just the ability to define the X/Y co-ordinates of an actor without going into it, it would have taken me 10 minutes, 20 max.

    This is a huge issue for users, I think much bigger than GS staff realise. Even having actors that are dragged onto the screen snap to the nearest X/Y co-ordinate would be a MASSIVE improvement.

  • SLOCM3ZSLOCM3Z Member Posts: 797

    @Clock said:
    welcome to the gamesald design environment.

    lol

  • SLOCM3ZSLOCM3Z Member Posts: 797

    Why didn't you TRY/TEST GameSalad creator first?

  • KevinCrossKevinCross London, UKMember Posts: 1,894
    edited July 2015

    @WebWarrior said:
    It's not so much that it's too hard to do. It's just that we have bigger fish to fry in terms of stability, feature parity, and engine features (which are easier to implement than Creator features since we only have to build them in one codebase).

    Do you guys ever use GameSalad yourselves? What jars you the most with it if so?

    If you don't use it yourselves. I think you should!

  • ChunkypixelsChunkypixels Member Posts: 1,114
    edited July 2015

    @WebWarrior ...then I fear that your/GameSalads priorities are somewhat at odds to those of the developers using your software.

    Software ease of usability, and a clean and productive interface are paramount to the end users workflow. If, after 5 years, that is simply not understood as being a massive issue, then quite frankly Im dumbfounded...

    Yet again... GameSalad is ignoring the fact that its core product, is its engine and tool... and to blindly ignore that the interface has been lacking basic features that EVERY other competing toolset has, is just foolish in the extreme. The editor features that we're talking about here would improve the workflow of every single user... not just a minority, unlike most other features that always get concentrated on.

    Really... what bigger fish are there, than to make the tool as easy and productive to use as possible....

  • WebWarriorWebWarrior Member, PRO Posts: 62
    edited July 2015

    If you guys truly think that Snap to Grid is the biggest feature to add, there's a ticket for that! http://bugs.gamesalad.com/show_bug.cgi?id=657

    Currently has 6 votes and is ranked #8. #1 is polygon collisions with 34 votes, and #2 is custom fonts with 29 votes. Yet some of you are now saying that this is even more important than fixing crash bugs and finally making sure Windows Creator has all the features that Mac Creator does (this is what we mean by "feature parity" fyi). Let's keep things in perspective! :smile:

    While this isn't necessarily the order we'll implement features, this is the metric we use to determine what the community really wants. If that's not accurate, then we're going to have a really hard time prioritizing the features everyone wants.

    In summary, please vote for what you want! We don't make prioritization decisions from forum conversations alone.

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,369
    edited July 2015

    @WebWarrior said:
    If you guys truly think that Snap to Grid is the biggest feature to add, there's a ticket for that! http://bugs.gamesalad.com/show_bug.cgi?id=657

    This is a terrible way of gauging real user interest. You'll never get a representative view of what will actually make the biggest difference to your user base. Especially when such a tiny, tiny, tiny % of it is getting involved. Unless GameSalad really really is in trouble and they have about 100 active subscribers.

    I would strongly recommend making a survey, short and easy to complete, and emailing all Basic/Pro users asking them to complete it. Give them 10-20 options and get them to pick the 5 that matter most and the order they prioritise them. I bet you'll get a very different view on how things stand.

  • KevinCrossKevinCross London, UKMember Posts: 1,894

    @WebWarrior said:
    If you guys truly think that Snap to Grid is the biggest feature to add, there's a ticket for that! http://bugs.gamesalad.com/show_bug.cgi?id=657

    Currently has 6 votes and is ranked #8. #1 is polygon collisions with 34 votes, and #2 is custom fonts with 29 votes. Yet some of you are now saying that this is even more important than fixing crash bugs and finally making sure Windows Creator has all the features that Mac Creator does (this is what we mean by "feature parity" fyi). Let's keep things in perspective! :smile:

    You must realise you have more than 34 people using GameSalad! I'd hate to think what percentage of your total users 34 is...

  • ChunkypixelsChunkypixels Member Posts: 1,114
    edited July 2015

    @WebWarrior ...ok let me approach this from a slightly different angle...

    If you had a programmer free for a month, could you guarantee that they could implement polygon collisions as a fully working, bug free update to the software? Would it be more realistic and feasible for that coder to implement Snap to Grid, and multiple copy and paste of actors within that given month if it was their sole task?

    Im betting that the latter would be more realistic and achievable. Improving the usability of the software by a massive amount for every single end user... can you not see that?

    Sometimes, you just need to use common sense as to what priorities should be... the biggest overall gains for the least effort.

    I mean... honestly... are we even anywhere near getting polygon collisions in the next month or two? Using the limited voting, to determine your development priorities is silly. I mean 34 votes out of how many tens of thousands of users?... Your using the voting as a smokescreen....

  • dgackeydgackey Austin, TXInactive, PRO, Chef Emeritus Posts: 699

    What @WebWarrior is saying here is that there are thousands of forum users and the general consensus is "we want the following 10000 issues addressed. The top priority is, obviously, all of them."

    This is not a new problem. It was not a new problem when we added the public-facing bug database in response to community request.

    Does this mean the bug database public votes are the only way we gauge priority? Of course not. What this means is that you, the community, asked for a way to make development priorities more transparent and we gave it to you. It's a tool that is available for you as a community to use to help inform us in a more representative manner than "I've posted about this many times".

    I know it's tempting to assume that the people here are incapable of identifying or resolving "obvious" "easy" issues that have been around for a long time. It may even be tempting to think that "they just don't care" about the product. All I can tell you is that these ideas are all way off-base.

    @Wyrmfire's experience is a valid one and is useful feedback. Thanks for sharing it.

    Dan Magaha · COO · GameSalad, Inc · danm@gamesalad.com

  • AlchimiaStudiosAlchimiaStudios Member Posts: 1,069

    @dgackey said:
    What WebWarrior is saying here is that there are thousands of forum users and the general consensus is "we want the following 10000 issues addressed. The top priority is, obviously, all of them."

    This is not a new problem. It was not a new problem when we added the public-facing bug database in response to community request.

    Does this mean the bug database public votes are the only way we gauge priority? Of course not. What this means is that you, the community, asked for a way to make development priorities more transparent and we gave it to you. It's a tool that is available for you as a community to use to help inform us in a more representative manner than "I've posted about this many times".

    I know it's tempting to assume that the people here are incapable of identifying or resolving "obvious" "easy" issues that have been around for a long time. It may even be tempting to think that "they just don't care" about the product. All I can tell you is that these ideas are all way off-base.

    Wyrmfire's experience is a valid one and is useful feedback. Thanks for sharing it.

    Yep, pro user, been here for 4+ yrs. "Snap to" is near the bottom of my list. Better tile support is also fairly low on the list. Custom fonts is way higher, so is image folders and a searchable actor field.

    Even higher on my list is new rendering engine and .exe support.

    So there you have it, everyones got an opinion and they don't always align, so GS does the best they can.

    Follow us: Twitter - Website

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,369
    edited July 2015

    @dgackey said:
    I know it's tempting to assume that the people here are incapable of identifying or resolving "obvious" "easy" issues that have been around for a long time. It may even be tempting to think that "they just don't care" about the product. All I can tell you is that these ideas are all way off-base.

    I don't think anyone thinks you don't know about them or don't care about the product. It's very, very obvious GameSalad greatly cares about their product. And it's also obvious that the currently remaining team care even more.

    But spending 6 years facing the same old interface issues with there being no sign of any intention to ever do anything about them is pretty depressing. Literally hundreds of threads and posts on the forums about the issues with no replies from GS. There will always be a new, flashier feature to add that will get popular support. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find myself sat there six years down the road going into and out of actors, expanding drop down lists, changing X and Y coordinates, and then going back out of the actor and in to the next one. And that makes me sad.

  • ChunkypixelsChunkypixels Member Posts: 1,114
    edited July 2015

    @dgackey ... I'll say it again... just look at it with straightforward common sense and logic.

    Lots of smaller, easier to implement fixes and improvements to the interface and tools that bring a huge increase in productivity and ease of use to every single user of the software. How can that not be a priority...

    Like I say..its been 5 years... its not like were talking about features that require half a dozen coders to implement over a timeframe of half a year... Its stuff that ONE programmer, if allotted solely to the editor, should be able to implement in a month or two, if not weeks...

    Instead, its always bigger, more resource intensive paths that are trod... and half of the time they just get canned or end up half finished. Editor improvements have always been pushed to the back, as different strategies keep getting rolled out... each of which, so far, seem to fail... so maybe just for once, how about going down the route of just concentrating on improving the editor and tools, and see how that strategy works out.

    Are you really going to argue that we're not talking sense here, and that maybe, just maybe your priorities might be wrong...

  • SocksSocks London, UK.Member Posts: 12,822

    @Armelline said:
    This is a huge issue for users, I think much bigger than GS staff realise. Even having actors that are dragged onto the screen snap to the nearest X/Y co-ordinate would be a MASSIVE improvement.

    Agreed, this is an enormous problem, it's been an enormous forever, and has been complained about for years - and ignored by GameSalad for years.

    Users can choose to ignore the issue - and leave their actors on sub-pixel co-ordinates - but this effectively defeats all the advice about making assets divisible by 4 - resulting in less than optimal image fidelity.

    Or you can address the issue by opening up every actor you place in the scene and manually rounding both the X and Y co-ordinates to the nearest whole number . . . but this can easily be hundreds of actors a week . . . there are dozens of repetitive actions like this you need to repeat again and again that partly defeats the whole notion of GameSalad being a rapid prototyping, easy to use, drag and drop environment.

  • dgackeydgackey Austin, TXInactive, PRO, Chef Emeritus Posts: 699

    @Chunkypixels said:

    Are you really going to argue that we're not talking sense here, and that maybe, just maybe your priorities might be wrong...

    No, what I'm arguing here is that arguing over the manner in which we develop GS isn't really productive.

    Dan Magaha · COO · GameSalad, Inc · danm@gamesalad.com

  • TitanFuryTitanFury Member Posts: 55

    @Armelline said:
    I would strongly recommend making a survey, short and easy to complete, and emailing all Basic/Pro users asking them to complete it. Give them 10-20 options and get them to pick the 5 that matter most and the order they prioritise them. I bet you'll get a very different view on how things stand.

    That would be amazing! Great idea Armelline, I really hope they decide to do this.

  • ArmellineArmelline Member, PRO Posts: 5,369

    It's also worrying me that most of the GS staff replies over the past couple of days have been to the more... fringe views and comments, and the many carefully expressed and constructive comments and feedbacks have been (seemingly) ignored. It's easier to engage with the trolling comments but they're not the ones that people really want to see replies to.

  • ChunkypixelsChunkypixels Member Posts: 1,114
    edited July 2015

    @dgackey said:
    No, what I'm arguing here is that arguing over the manner in which we develop GS isn't really productive.

    How can you say that? Of course it could be productive. Your getting feedback and suggestions from the people using your software. Theres problems, big problems in how GameSalad has been developed over the years... otherwise we wouldn't be at the state were in now, and the software's interface wouldn't still be missing such basic features.

    Its only non productive if you decide to ignore the feedback and suggestions. Its only non productive if you leave the tool interface as is... as its been for 5 years.

    So its really down to GS as to whether its productive for the users/customers to discuss development and priorities or not.

This discussion has been closed.