Hey Gendai, GameSalad is lacking essential GAMING functionality!!!!
dknell
Member Posts: 48
This post turned out much bigger than I had intended. If you read the whole thing, it gets into the reason (or my theory) why these "features" are missing.
Yes, I realize GS is beta and I know these missing features have been discussed before...
* Pause. The work-around by quantumsheep and codemonkey "works" but really cripples games and slows development.
* Z-axis positioning/movement. At least for the camera. I'm not a game engine expert, and I realize that GS is a 2D engine, but I see a lot of 2D games that zoom in and out without resizing images.
* Leaderboard. Almost all modern games have a way to publish scores.
* Arrays or database access. This one is not necessarily a "gaming" feature but it would give us so much more power in development and allow us to make very robust games.
There have been a lot of GREAT games to come out of GameSalad - you guys are extremely talented game developers! But, in order to take it to the next level we at least need the functionality that is included in most of the games on the market today.
Now I know that some features may be rolled into the Pro membership, but as I mentioned before (http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=9166#post-65004), I wouldn't mind paying a small amount for each feature.
Why don't we have these features right now? I say it's because of Gendai's business model. They charge for a tool, actually 2. Adding features to GS Pro doesn't make them more money, unless a new customer thinks that feature is so awesome they need to "subscribe" to it for $2000/year.
We all know that it all comes down to money. Gendai needs to make money on this product, which is fine. But how many people actually buy the Pro membership - I can't imagine too many. I think they should try to make MORE smaller ticket products instead of selling a few big ticket products like the Pro membership.
Let's think about that for a minute. This would benefit EVERYONE involved - Gendai makes more sales on a regular basis and we get more features - faster (because they want to make more money). I can't think of a single feature that would make me shell out $2000 every year. There are certainly a couple that I would pay $100 or $200 for.
So what does money have to do with "essential gaming functionality"? I'd be willing to bet that the reason pause or "preserve previous scene" was taken out is because they want to make it a "Pro" feature. I'd up the ante and say that's also the reasoning behind the majority of forthcoming "big" features. Damn that business model of selling a tool!!!
HEY GENDAI, WANT MORE MONEY???? HERE'S HOW:
Besides the À la carte features I was talking about, another idea is to make a library of game assets - sounds, images, sprites, fonts... This would work like the Loop browser in GarageBand and could be built into GS. Want to make it even better (and make MORE money)? Allow purchases and downloads in GS also! You could even let developers submit content to this "Asset Store" and take a cut. Take it a step further and sell behaviors and actions in the Asset Store.
Now that you're rolling in all this money from the Asset Store, you can make GS free for everyone which brings even more customers that can purchase these assets. Oh, and you can remove all the red tape from your feature approval process because you no longer need a way to monetize them.
This is just my opinion.
Dave
Yes, I realize GS is beta and I know these missing features have been discussed before...
* Pause. The work-around by quantumsheep and codemonkey "works" but really cripples games and slows development.
* Z-axis positioning/movement. At least for the camera. I'm not a game engine expert, and I realize that GS is a 2D engine, but I see a lot of 2D games that zoom in and out without resizing images.
* Leaderboard. Almost all modern games have a way to publish scores.
* Arrays or database access. This one is not necessarily a "gaming" feature but it would give us so much more power in development and allow us to make very robust games.
There have been a lot of GREAT games to come out of GameSalad - you guys are extremely talented game developers! But, in order to take it to the next level we at least need the functionality that is included in most of the games on the market today.
Now I know that some features may be rolled into the Pro membership, but as I mentioned before (http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=9166#post-65004), I wouldn't mind paying a small amount for each feature.
Why don't we have these features right now? I say it's because of Gendai's business model. They charge for a tool, actually 2. Adding features to GS Pro doesn't make them more money, unless a new customer thinks that feature is so awesome they need to "subscribe" to it for $2000/year.
We all know that it all comes down to money. Gendai needs to make money on this product, which is fine. But how many people actually buy the Pro membership - I can't imagine too many. I think they should try to make MORE smaller ticket products instead of selling a few big ticket products like the Pro membership.
Let's think about that for a minute. This would benefit EVERYONE involved - Gendai makes more sales on a regular basis and we get more features - faster (because they want to make more money). I can't think of a single feature that would make me shell out $2000 every year. There are certainly a couple that I would pay $100 or $200 for.
So what does money have to do with "essential gaming functionality"? I'd be willing to bet that the reason pause or "preserve previous scene" was taken out is because they want to make it a "Pro" feature. I'd up the ante and say that's also the reasoning behind the majority of forthcoming "big" features. Damn that business model of selling a tool!!!
HEY GENDAI, WANT MORE MONEY???? HERE'S HOW:
Besides the À la carte features I was talking about, another idea is to make a library of game assets - sounds, images, sprites, fonts... This would work like the Loop browser in GarageBand and could be built into GS. Want to make it even better (and make MORE money)? Allow purchases and downloads in GS also! You could even let developers submit content to this "Asset Store" and take a cut. Take it a step further and sell behaviors and actions in the Asset Store.
Now that you're rolling in all this money from the Asset Store, you can make GS free for everyone which brings even more customers that can purchase these assets. Oh, and you can remove all the red tape from your feature approval process because you no longer need a way to monetize them.
This is just my opinion.
Dave
Comments
I realize that doesn't solve all the issues, but it addresses one of them at least...
Possesive Gaming
I know that work-arounds have been hacked together, but let's say that Gendai adds Z-axis camera control, pause, or leaderboards in a future version then all of our hacked games will either break or will need a hefty overhaul. I am all for hacking when necessary, but I guess my point of the original post is that these "essential" gaming functions may be held back because of Gendai's business model of selling a tool as opposed to selling features.
@Possesive, how can you make leaderboards without network connectivity (without a Pro membership)?
Cheers Possesive Gaming.
The camera is easy to zoom, rotate and such. I don't feel the need for array right now.
For me, leaderboard and such is what gs is really lacking (other than performance, that can get better). I mean, every app I have on my iphone has openfeint support.
Not to mention facebook or twitter support. Those thing seems the least in every app nowadays.
I understand the main theme. Pro is not really worth $1999. It's a huge risk. I've been seriously considering upgrading, but it's just too expensive. It seems like I could lose a lot of money, or just break even, by upgrading to Pro.
I agree with you about the memory consumption of the preserve previous scene option.
Don't get me wrong - I think GameSalad is a great tool. I just think that it would benefit everyone involved if it was monetized a little differently.
I'll be honest though, if I made a game with GS and it made a lot of money, I'd probably hire an xcode developer to rewrite my game in Objective-C and have the opportunity to take advantage of all the iPhone SDK features and other libraries like OpenFeint. That, to me, would be a better value for my money.
On the other hand, I may not be so quick to jump ship if the $2000 hurdle was gone and the features were sold in some sort of store. I could be totally wrong about this, but I feel that the features would be released more rapidly under this model. And that's sort of what would keep me on board longer.
It's a fixed text attribute. You cannot concatenate attributes to the end of it.
Leader boards will probably be a non-issue when gamecenter goes live (I bet anything GS will be onboard from the close to the beginning).
Pause - Not as much of an issue with iOS 4.0 multitasking, but still would be nice.
Arrays - I agree - we need them.
http://gamesalad.com/wiki/behaviors_reference:open_url
A lot more could be done with that behavior with the ability to modify the value. It's still not impossible though. Heh, just create a lot of copies of the open url behavior, then make a leaderboard based on progress. When players beat the game, they can enter their name in the website, confirming that they beat the game.
I agree that it could be more powerful. I am not aware of all the issues involved though.
Hell, I can't even finish this one game because of some of the areas GameSalad falls short in.....
Pick random(1,10)
when = 1 display text hello
when = 2 display text good bye
when = 9 display text stfu (haha)
etc.
I mean have it as simple as we have it with random numbers. Just use Random and input the different text it can pick from. That would be useful.
This took close to an hour, because even WITH copy and pasting, it was taking forever.