When you are lazy and impatient and 14 years old which is your suggested market. you play with game salad for a month then you realize it 's actually real work to make a game as oppose to just making a scene where you click on the button and the square jumps up"
then you get a snapchat message get distracted and you give and go play battlefield
and don't renew your subscription. because the easy fun part is over.
You must not be a coder you have miss read the equation. The lazy and impatient students capable of coding are a percentage of the small percentage of students capable of high level coding. These students are part of the market GS is aiming for but only a tiny part of it.
The bulk of the market is made up of the kids who will never have the ability to code because they are not wired that way. They are the bulk of the "= Possible paying GS subscriptions" part of the equation.
Unity is almost done working on their own visual scripting tool....as for no coding plugins : there's playmaker and Gameflow , the later being very similar to gamesalad built for unity...
ALL the game engine companies are realizing the potential from hobbyist and are getting on that wagon. the kid who will be persevering beyond his own laziness will acquire skills and eventually ask himself why this and that feature or not in gamesalad and will move onto other packages. which by the way are completely free.. which is another thing that makes a difference........ so i do believe beside school buying game salad the actual kid getting too is very very minute %
Maybe so, all the more reason to get into that market fast and secure a chunk of it.
it s going to be hard to get a chunk of it now that apple is going for it. with swift playground one thing all these have in a common is the word : FREE
@colander @blob said:
When you are lazy and impatient and 14 years old which is your suggested market. you play with game salad for a month then you realize it 's actually real work to make a game as oppose to just making a scene where you click on the button and the square jumps up"
then you get a snapchat message get distracted and you give and go play battlefield
and don't renew your subscription. because the easy fun part is over.
i was referring to the kid not wired for coding above....and because it 's not in his nature it won't last long before then move on to something else. as people don't stick with things that are not in their nature too long. Out of the 3 kids doing this 1 kid will keep going and eventual outgrow game salad or give up a little later as it is not in his nature after all. Focus and tenacity not being the hallmark of a teen searching for who they want to be. this is a niche in a niche of a niche market you are talking ........ GS only chance is with school sale directly not students.....
beside... any kid can be wired for coding.....
saying some kids are not wired for coding is like saying some kids are not wired for reading...
in 20 years all kids coming out of high school will have at least intermediate coding skills as part of the curriculum.... it will be like reading or writing.
however i do get what you are saying but
@colander said:
You must not be a coder you have miss read the equation.
You must not be a business man or marketeer you have miscalculated the odds and misunderstood the demographic in question
@blob said:
When you are lazy and impatient and 14 years old which is your suggested market.
Where did I say that please quote me in context.
i was referring to the kid not wired for coding above....and because it 's not in his nature it won't last long before then move on to something else.
Not true. A lot of people want to create games but can't handle the coding side of it but can cope with drag and drop. This is the bulk of GS's market and getting to students should be a good fit for them.
You must not be a business man or marketeer you have miscalculated the odds and misunderstood the demographic in question
It is not a difficult concept to get your head around. Out of all the people who would like to write a game the majority of them would never be able to handle hard core coding so would never try. With GameSalad a lot of them might and then stick around as paying subscribers.
in 20 years all kids coming out of high school will have at least intermediate coding skills as part of the curriculum.... it will be like reading or writing.
I think in 20 years you will be able to just talk to your computer to create many things including games without writing any code. I certainly hope so if people still have to write code the way we do today it will be a real hand brake for technological progress, it is a very labour intensive process. You can already see the pace of hardware has slowed down because software isn't pushing it like it use too.
Writing code in the future might not be a handy skill unless you intend to be a software engineer.
ZZzzZ.. a hint guys... if you comment dont write essay.. this is not a school competition that you have to write a long essay on GS to get max. points Just few words are enough or else its difficult for me or anyone else to follow up !! Care for community please lolz
it s going to be hard to get a chunk of it now that apple is going for it. with swift playground one thing all these have in a common is the word : FREE
swift playground isn't the same thing, it's not really a competition for Gamesalad. It's an iPad only app that allows you to play with coding samples, not create an actual game. It's going to be huge competition for all those swift classes on Udemy, but no real competition for GS.
About Swift Playground, Apple, Gamesalad, Udemy and all that. I think there is room for everything and none will really cancel out the other. Different people like to learn in different ways, some may prefer Swift Playground over a Udemy class while some people will always prefer the structure of a 'class' and the attention of a teacher (online or in person at school), while still others will prefer to read a book and follow examples at their own pace.
More options for learning anything (game dev or otherwise) is great as far as I'm concerned!
Not sure why people are expecting lots of replies. He specifically said he was going to be having @ForumNinja communicate on the forums for him, and @ForumNinja has addressed pretty much all the points. Maybe not to everyone's satisfaction, but he's been pretty clear. To summarise:
Education market will get priority but new features being developed for them will largely/entirely benefit developers too.
Non-education developers will not be forgotten.
A roadmap is incoming, outlining in more detail what's planned.
Developer specific tools like advertising SDKs will continue to be supported.
You can't expect the CEO or anyone else to give you too much inside information regarding the day to day operations of a private company. Nor can you expect the CEO to be replying to forum posts. Companies employ/assign community liaison staff to do that for them.
The only really big question mark right now is if the most requested feature - Google Play Services - is out of the question now, or if it's still incoming.
I honestly don't know what people are expecting here. If you have specific questions you want answers to, that haven't already been answered, write the question out, tagging @ForumNinja, and make it a clear question, not part of a 2000 word essay/rant.
@Armelline said:
Not sure why people are expecting lots of replies. He specifically said he was going to be having @ForumNinja communicate on the forums for him, and @ForumNinja has addressed pretty much all the points. Maybe not to everyone's satisfaction, but he's been pretty clear. To summarise:
Education market will get priority but new features being developed for them will largely/entirely benefit developers too.
Non-education developers will not be forgotten.
A roadmap is incoming, outlining in more detail what's planned.
Developer specific tools like advertising SDKs will continue to be supported.
You can't expect the CEO or anyone else to give you too much inside information regarding the day to day operations of a private company.
The only really big question mark right now is if the most requested feature - Google Play Services - is out of the question now, or if it's still incoming.
I honestly don't know what people are expecting here.
I'm the CEO of a company much larger than Gamesalad and I regularly post in my forum. It keeps people motivated and my users happy knowing their CEO cares. Sorry for requesting too much from Gamesalad @Armelline.
@Hypnorabbit said:
I'm the CEO of a company much larger than Gamesalad and I regularly post in my forum. It keeps people motivated and my users happy knowing their CEO cares. Sorry for requesting too much from Gamesalad @Armelline.
You are a calming influence @Armelline – you've made some pertinent points there. I guess I've just been freaking out at the idea that this could fall apart. Hey, would you be prepared to be a tester for me? And @jamie_c – would you test for me?
@Armelline A simple acknowledgement and "hello, thanks for all your feedback. Just so you know I read each and every one of your posts and they're valuable to us. This is a long journey and I recognise there may be change in some areas but your voices count and I'm reading your feedback with interest."
It's just not hard to do and keep doing.
I hate silent CEOs that sit in their ivory tower and fail to engage with their denizens.
@Hypnorabbit said: @Armelline A simple acknowledgement and "hello, thanks for all you feedback. Just so you know I read each and every one of your posts and they're valuable to us. This is a long journey and I recognise there may be change in some areas but your voices count and I'm reading your feedback with interest."
It's just not hard to do and keep doing.
I hate silent CEOs that sit in their ivory tower and fail to engage with their denizens.
Well he did respond to the initial questions and complaints (some, at least) and @ForumNinja has responded to many more. But if you want a reply from him specifically, that's fair enough. I'd rather he focus on keeping GameSalad as successful as possible rather than trawling the forums, personally. We just need @ForumNinja to confirm that people's concerns and complaints are making it to his desk, even if in a more condensed form. Hell, I spend longer on the forums than most people and even I couldn't make it through all the posts in this thread.
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,159
As a co-founder of the company I thought I'd chime in.
First off, I'd like to address where your subscription fees go. Yes, some of that goes to updates, but updates come in many forms. It's not just about new features. It's bug fixes, upkeep for ad network libraries, working on device compatibility issues, and OS compatibility. Remember, Apple throws us a curveball almost every year (this year, it's two curveballs with macOS and iOS 10). Android is a little better in one sense (the OS updates don't often break things), but we have to deal with the vast ecosystem of android devices.
And like any business, we have expenses: customer support (that speech bubble in the lower right has actual people sitting behind it!), servers to run publishing and to host these forums, and devices to test on (image if you had to buy every iPhone generation and major Android device to test with). Your subscription fees are working hard to keep this machine running!
Last year we decided to get back to basics. We’re not going to try to be everything to everyone.
Build an awesome tool to make game creation fun.
Charge money for it.
Crazy, right?
We make a good tool. If it's good enough for you, pay us. If it's not, you stop paying us, until we do a better job.
GameSalad's mission has always been to enable people to see that game development
as something ANYONE can participate in. With education, we see a way to continue this
mission and get GameSalad into as many hands as possible. The world, and the U.S. in
particular, are pushing hard to ensure children are literate in computational thinking.
We were recently told by an educator: “There are very few things I’ve done as a teacher that makes students eyes light up like GameSalad does… The kid’s don’t give a damn about anything to do with coding, but they think [GameSalad] is awesome and they want to do more.”
For us, this is a huge opportunity to both follow our mission AND grow the business. Too often, children don't pursue a skill because they think it's "too hard". As you all know, GameSalad is ideal for getting over the blocks people have about how hard it is to program a computer. AND it's fun! AND they see that they can make REAL games with it. They see it in the apps you make and they see that apps they can make.
YOUR games are what inspire these kids.
So we're still going to build stuff that you need make your games great. We'll be working on helping you make great games first. Helping you make money on your games comes second, but it will happen.
What makes GameSalad special is how easy it is to use. Hiding unnecessary complexity, improving workflow, building features that allow deeper interaction and programming, these are core to our mission. If GameSalad is easier to use, faster to use, more fun to use, then everyone wins!
swift playground isn't the same thing, it's not really a competition for Gamesalad. It's an iPad only app that allows you to play with coding samples, not create an actual game. It's going to be huge competition for all those swift classes on Udemy, but no real competition for GS.
iPad only ! and no full game. i didn't know and stand correct ...Although it would've been Cool.....
@adent42 said:
We make a good tool. If it's good enough for you, pay us. If it's not, you stop paying us, until we do a better job.
Thank you @adent42 .
I do think everyone here wants to keep paying you guys. and keep using Gamesalad
We all want Gamesalad to grow, its potential is endless!
However It would be nice to have a rough timeframe/roadmap for developer specific features that we have been waiting for for so long ex:
Google Play
facebook Integration
Loading time optimization (I understand that one is a tough one to quantify in man hours)
push notification
These things are paramount to developers in order to be competitive, having a roadmap even if it s 6 month from now is better than nothing and would be encouraging .
adent42Key Master, Head Chef, Executive Chef, Member, PROPosts: 3,159
@blob So I can't speak to a definitive roadmap, since we're not planning far ahead (yet).
I will say that of the things you mention, loading time optimizations will likely be tackled first as it fits the "make your games better" criteria and benefits both audiences (we also have some initial work done there, though I don't know what state it's in).
With the rest of your list (and don't take this as gosphel as we haven't actually done the planning yet), I imagine Facebook would be next as we have a version of that code in a branch somewhere, just not well tested.
Google Play and Push notifications haven't even been touched yet, so those will be further down the road.
I personally would like to see push notifications as the first thing after load time optimizations, as it enables things like chat and makes turn based multiplayer a better experience (and again, push servers the better game criteria for all). I actually wanted to recreate the "Yo" chat app in GameSalad when it came out, but without push notifications, it wouldn't really work
I will conclude by saying that this all hinges on how soon we get through the work flow improvements (snap-to-grid, zoom, etc) as well as some long needed improvements to simplify the new user experience. We also have iOS and macOS compatibility updates to contend with and we'll still be watching http://bugs.gamesalad.com/ to see what users are voting for.
So whatever you find important, rally people around voting for it!
@adent42 said:
I will say that of the things you mention, loading time optimizations will likely be tackled first as it fits the "make your games better" criteria and benefits both audiences (we also have some initial work done there, though I don't know what state it's in).
This is awesome news. Long loading times are, in my opinion, the biggest hurdle GameSalad faces when it comes to being seen as a "professional" tool. I'd personally love to see this even before layout tools!
Comments
@blob interesting
wish you the best with gamesalad
Where are the new CEO??? @bdusing
Homepage: freneticgamez.eu/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FreneticGamez
You must not be a coder you have miss read the equation. The lazy and impatient students capable of coding are a percentage of the small percentage of students capable of high level coding. These students are part of the market GS is aiming for but only a tiny part of it.
The bulk of the market is made up of the kids who will never have the ability to code because they are not wired that way. They are the bulk of the "= Possible paying GS subscriptions" part of the equation.
Maybe so, all the more reason to get into that market fast and secure a chunk of it.
Universal Binary Template - Universal Binary Template Instructions Rev 4 (Short) - Custom Score Display Template
it s going to be hard to get a chunk of it now that apple is going for it. with swift playground one thing all these have in a common is the word : FREE
@colander
@blob said:
When you are lazy and impatient and 14 years old which is your suggested market. you play with game salad for a month then you realize it 's actually real work to make a game as oppose to just making a scene where you click on the button and the square jumps up"
then you get a snapchat message get distracted and you give and go play battlefield
and don't renew your subscription. because the easy fun part is over.
i was referring to the kid not wired for coding above....and because it 's not in his nature it won't last long before then move on to something else. as people don't stick with things that are not in their nature too long. Out of the 3 kids doing this 1 kid will keep going and eventual outgrow game salad or give up a little later as it is not in his nature after all. Focus and tenacity not being the hallmark of a teen searching for who they want to be. this is a niche in a niche of a niche market you are talking ........ GS only chance is with school sale directly not students.....
beside... any kid can be wired for coding.....
saying some kids are not wired for coding is like saying some kids are not wired for reading...
in 20 years all kids coming out of high school will have at least intermediate coding skills as part of the curriculum.... it will be like reading or writing.
however i do get what you are saying but
You must not be a business man or marketeer you have miscalculated the odds and misunderstood the demographic in question
Where did I say that please quote me in context.
Not true. A lot of people want to create games but can't handle the coding side of it but can cope with drag and drop. This is the bulk of GS's market and getting to students should be a good fit for them.
It is not a difficult concept to get your head around. Out of all the people who would like to write a game the majority of them would never be able to handle hard core coding so would never try. With GameSalad a lot of them might and then stick around as paying subscribers.
I think in 20 years you will be able to just talk to your computer to create many things including games without writing any code. I certainly hope so if people still have to write code the way we do today it will be a real hand brake for technological progress, it is a very labour intensive process. You can already see the pace of hardware has slowed down because software isn't pushing it like it use too.
Writing code in the future might not be a handy skill unless you intend to be a software engineer.
Universal Binary Template - Universal Binary Template Instructions Rev 4 (Short) - Custom Score Display Template
ZZzzZ.. a hint guys... if you comment dont write essay.. this is not a school competition that you have to write a long essay on GS to get max. points
Just few words are enough or else its difficult for me or anyone else to follow up 
!! Care for community please 
lolz
Current Projects I am working on: Stupid Duck, Zango's Shark Adventure, AoD: Age of Dragons, Rocket Jump: The Pixel Invaders
Facebook: https://facebook.com/reflectivebytegamestudios
Web: reflectivebyte.com
Thursdays are great for official communications..
and still no clarification from the new CEO..
swift playground isn't the same thing, it's not really a competition for Gamesalad. It's an iPad only app that allows you to play with coding samples, not create an actual game. It's going to be huge competition for all those swift classes on Udemy, but no real competition for GS.
Send and Receive Data using your own Server Tutorial! | Vote for A Long Way Home on Steam Greenlight! | Ten Years Left
Wow 8 pages of comments from the impassioned Gamesalad community and not a single reply from our Lord and CEO @bdusing. He loves us guys!
yeah.... he's passionate about the whole game dev thing..
About Swift Playground, Apple, Gamesalad, Udemy and all that. I think there is room for everything and none will really cancel out the other. Different people like to learn in different ways, some may prefer Swift Playground over a Udemy class while some people will always prefer the structure of a 'class' and the attention of a teacher (online or in person at school), while still others will prefer to read a book and follow examples at their own pace.
More options for learning anything (game dev or otherwise) is great as far as I'm concerned!
http://jamie-cross.net/posts/ ✮ Udemy: Introduction to Mobile Games Development ✮ Learn Mobile Game Development in One Day Using Gamesalad ✮ My Patreon Page
Not sure why people are expecting lots of replies. He specifically said he was going to be having @ForumNinja communicate on the forums for him, and @ForumNinja has addressed pretty much all the points. Maybe not to everyone's satisfaction, but he's been pretty clear. To summarise:
You can't expect the CEO or anyone else to give you too much inside information regarding the day to day operations of a private company. Nor can you expect the CEO to be replying to forum posts. Companies employ/assign community liaison staff to do that for them.
The only really big question mark right now is if the most requested feature - Google Play Services - is out of the question now, or if it's still incoming.
I honestly don't know what people are expecting here. If you have specific questions you want answers to, that haven't already been answered, write the question out, tagging @ForumNinja, and make it a clear question, not part of a 2000 word essay/rant.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
+1
I'm the CEO of a company much larger than Gamesalad and I regularly post in my forum. It keeps people motivated and my users happy knowing their CEO cares. Sorry for requesting too much from Gamesalad @Armelline.
What exactly are you requesting?
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
ooo... are you Mark Zuckerberg? If so, will you adopt me? I'm low maintenance. I just like to eat and play around with games!
You are a calming influence @Armelline – you've made some pertinent points there. I guess I've just been freaking out at the idea that this could fall apart. Hey, would you be prepared to be a tester for me? And @jamie_c – would you test for me?
@Armelline A simple acknowledgement and "hello, thanks for all your feedback. Just so you know I read each and every one of your posts and they're valuable to us. This is a long journey and I recognise there may be change in some areas but your voices count and I'm reading your feedback with interest."
It's just not hard to do and keep doing.
I hate silent CEOs that sit in their ivory tower and fail to engage with their denizens.
Well he did respond to the initial questions and complaints (some, at least) and @ForumNinja has responded to many more. But if you want a reply from him specifically, that's fair enough. I'd rather he focus on keeping GameSalad as successful as possible rather than trawling the forums, personally. We just need @ForumNinja to confirm that people's concerns and complaints are making it to his desk, even if in a more condensed form. Hell, I spend longer on the forums than most people and even I couldn't make it through all the posts in this thread.
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support
haha yep, pages 5-7 were a bit of a mess
Send and Receive Data using your own Server Tutorial! | Vote for A Long Way Home on Steam Greenlight! | Ten Years Left
As a co-founder of the company I thought I'd chime in.
First off, I'd like to address where your subscription fees go. Yes, some of that goes to updates, but updates come in many forms. It's not just about new features. It's bug fixes, upkeep for ad network libraries, working on device compatibility issues, and OS compatibility. Remember, Apple throws us a curveball almost every year (this year, it's two curveballs with macOS and iOS 10). Android is a little better in one sense (the OS updates don't often break things), but we have to deal with the vast ecosystem of android devices.
And like any business, we have expenses: customer support (that speech bubble in the lower right has actual people sitting behind it!), servers to run publishing and to host these forums, and devices to test on (image if you had to buy every iPhone generation and major Android device to test with). Your subscription fees are working hard to keep this machine running!
Last year we decided to get back to basics. We’re not going to try to be everything to everyone.
Build an awesome tool to make game creation fun.
Charge money for it.
Crazy, right?
We make a good tool. If it's good enough for you, pay us. If it's not, you stop paying us, until we do a better job.
GameSalad's mission has always been to enable people to see that game development
as something ANYONE can participate in. With education, we see a way to continue this
mission and get GameSalad into as many hands as possible. The world, and the U.S. in
particular, are pushing hard to ensure children are literate in computational thinking.
We were recently told by an educator: “There are very few things I’ve done as a teacher that makes students eyes light up like GameSalad does… The kid’s don’t give a damn about anything to do with coding, but they think [GameSalad] is awesome and they want to do more.”
For us, this is a huge opportunity to both follow our mission AND grow the business. Too often, children don't pursue a skill because they think it's "too hard". As you all know, GameSalad is ideal for getting over the blocks people have about how hard it is to program a computer. AND it's fun! AND they see that they can make REAL games with it. They see it in the apps you make and they see that apps they can make.
YOUR games are what inspire these kids.
So we're still going to build stuff that you need make your games great. We'll be working on helping you make great games first. Helping you make money on your games comes second, but it will happen.
What makes GameSalad special is how easy it is to use. Hiding unnecessary complexity, improving workflow, building features that allow deeper interaction and programming, these are core to our mission. If GameSalad is easier to use, faster to use, more fun to use, then everyone wins!
iPad only ! and no full game. i didn't know and stand correct ...Although it would've been Cool.....
Thank you @adent42 .
I do think everyone here wants to keep paying you guys. and keep using Gamesalad
We all want Gamesalad to grow, its potential is endless!
However It would be nice to have a rough timeframe/roadmap for developer specific features that we have been waiting for for so long ex:
Google Play
facebook Integration
Loading time optimization (I understand that one is a tough one to quantify in man hours)
push notification
These things are paramount to developers in order to be competitive, having a roadmap even if it s 6 month from now is better than nothing and would be encouraging .
@adent42
Great post, well said.
@adent42, thanks for the post.
http://jamie-cross.net/posts/ ✮ Udemy: Introduction to Mobile Games Development ✮ Learn Mobile Game Development in One Day Using Gamesalad ✮ My Patreon Page
@blob So I can't speak to a definitive roadmap, since we're not planning far ahead (yet).
I will say that of the things you mention, loading time optimizations will likely be tackled first as it fits the "make your games better" criteria and benefits both audiences (we also have some initial work done there, though I don't know what state it's in).
With the rest of your list (and don't take this as gosphel as we haven't actually done the planning yet), I imagine Facebook would be next as we have a version of that code in a branch somewhere, just not well tested.
Google Play and Push notifications haven't even been touched yet, so those will be further down the road.
I personally would like to see push notifications as the first thing after load time optimizations, as it enables things like chat and makes turn based multiplayer a better experience (and again, push servers the better game criteria for all). I actually wanted to recreate the "Yo" chat app in GameSalad when it came out, but without push notifications, it wouldn't really work
I will conclude by saying that this all hinges on how soon we get through the work flow improvements (snap-to-grid, zoom, etc) as well as some long needed improvements to simplify the new user experience. We also have iOS and macOS compatibility updates to contend with and we'll still be watching http://bugs.gamesalad.com/ to see what users are voting for.
So whatever you find important, rally people around voting for it!
This is awesome news. Long loading times are, in my opinion, the biggest hurdle GameSalad faces when it comes to being seen as a "professional" tool. I'd personally love to see this even before layout tools!
Contact me for custom work - Expert GS developer with 15 years of GS experience - Skype: armelline.support