Well, I just purchased the Corona license before the price goes up. I love GS and I am learning Corona. It doesn't seem to hard. Frankly I think I will be using both. GS for prototyping is great, but corona seems really fast too. In just two hours of learning I already have my background scene up from my main project in GS. Now the hard stuff starts though. All the crazy logic that you can easily drag and drop and move in GS.
I think GS really was and is a huge help in learning how to build a game. I would have never started without it. So I am happy to stay here while also working with Corona. I hope one day GS will be my only stop, but I can't face customers that have paid and the game crashes. Especially since I can't do anything about it. I have run my business for 7 years and that is not a fun position to be in. You can ruin your reputation with things that are totally out of your control.
Without a stable product GS will have to stay for prototyping for now. Great great tool. Hopefully the update will make it stable.
Here's my contribution to the discussion on "GS limitations". I got this as part of my presentation at Geekcamp.
-------------------- Case Study - "The Incident" game app
As far as I can tell, many prominent review sites have featured this game, quite a number with rave reviews. I have not really heard anything really negative about it so far from those articles that mention it.
Looking closer however will reveal that:
1. It does not support all orientations on iPad - this is a reason for Apple to automatically reject iPad apps, normally - it does not even support the reversed landscape orientation 2. It has no leaderboards, no OpenFeint or any of that sort of thing
I think many developers here would love to have the kind of exposure "The Incident" is getting and they managed to get away with it with some glaring omissions. It might even be said that GameSalad is mostly capable of assembling such a game.
--------------------
Perhaps we should look beyond the limitations and realise that it is still entirely possible to come up with something fun and capable of worldwide acclaim, when effort and creativity and marketing and what else all come together. I have a feeling that its less about the tool (GameSalad) and more about everything else in the mix with a huge dollop on creatively engaging your audience.
Of course, I will never be able to make certain kinds of games with GameSalad, but I would be really happy if one of mine makes it like "The Incident". And I have a feeling that it's really possible. At least with GameSalad, I have a chance.
The Incident is a beautiful game. Something like that can certainly be attempted in GameSalad.
@amigoni: I agree with using as many tools as you can. The more options you have at your disposal, the better.
If somebody wanted to "graduate" from GameSalad and move on to the next engine, then I would recommend iTorque 2D, not Corona.
Torque has things that are familiar to a GameSalad user, most importantly, Actors and Scenes.
Those might seem like basics, but a lot of environments don't have them.
For example, Corona does not have Scenes. You only have one Scene to work with. Which is fine for a simple game, but that gets to be a nightmare for something more complex.
Take my game Danger Cats! as an example. With GameSalad, I could rapidly lay out all the levels in the game by dragging Actors into position where I want them. I can quickly tweak them as well to my hearts content.
If I wanted to do that in something like Corona, I would make all my levels external text documents. I would type in all the positions of all the elements of the level. box1.x = 200. box1.y = 168. etc.. etc... for EVERY element in the Scene. I would be positioning everything blind. Each level would be hundreds of lines of code for all the attributes of all the elements.
The other option is to stack everything in the game on top of each other and turn their visibility on/off depending on what "scene" you are in.
Now, the new 'game edition' version of Corona might have the concept of Scenes, but I doubt it. I believe they just added Box2D and OpenFeint. It is a more robust version of Box2D than GameSalad's, but you have to type everything.
Torque gives you a graphical editor to lay out all your actors and levels, just like GameSalad. You set up all their positions, attributes, etc. - but then you control them with code. It also has a particle engine and a physics engine, etc. And TorqueScript is robust, you can pretty much create anything you want.
I bought Torque Game Builder 4 years ago, when they were still owned by GarageGames. I only got as far as creating a menu system in it, but it was still a few thousand lines of code. The iTorque 2D engine is an add-on to Torque 2D - which is what I have. iTorque costs an additional 400$ or so. The whole thing costs 750$, and you also get the complete source code with it, so you can add things like iAds or OpenFeint or whatever you want. You have to do it yourself, but you can add them.
And I don't mean to bash Corona in any way, it is very powerful, and very cool software. It's just going to be tough to create complicated games with it at first.
But I STILL prefer GameSalad to any of these engines. The speed at which I can make games with GameSalad is so exciting to me. It keeps my morale up to see things working so fast. And most importantly, I have the most fun using it.
Well.... firstly... congrats GS! You have impressed me!!!! FINALLY! Great Big Picture!
I'm glad to hear that there is a lot more coming too!
@Yodapollo I was wondering what you meant with "daily features":
Yodapollo said: There’s a lot more on the way. We have some major reworking on the GameSalad blog coming in the next couple of months (including news feeds, daily features, and more community-centric stories) as well as updated and re-optimized templates, with corresponding high-quality video and text tutorials.
If somebody wanted to "graduate" from GameSalad and move on to the next engine, then I would recommend iTorque 2D, not Corona.
Torque has things that are familiar to a GameSalad user, most importantly, Actors and Scenes.
We've been working with iTGB (or iTorque 2D) for the past 8 months and will be releasing our first game with it in the next month.
It's powerful, but the scripting language is not very fast on the devices, you pretty much have to go to C scripts in conjunction with it to make it really hum, so it hasn't been the "quick easy to learn for non-programmers" shortcut we thought it would be. Not at all.
Yes, we have OpenFeint integrated, which is huge, and I don't think we could have quite pulled off the game we have now with GS, but it has been a LONG development process and we have a C programmer working with us as well.
That's why I've been spending time here at GS the past week. Either GS will be a great prototyping tool or a development tool as well. I really hope for the latter. If they don't fill this niche someone else will.
More than anything I'm concerned with two things for GS:
1) What happened with Bumps. They made it into the top 25 and got bashed for crash/slow performance issues. That alone could stop us in our tracks from developing with GS. You can't have slow performance, you just can't. Maybe it was the developers, but it sounds like it was more the GS engine than anything.
2) Lack of OF, GameCenter or other viral spread opportunities. This is a big part of how top games stay top games. If people like GS games they have no quick, easy way to spread that to their friends. This is a major hole that GS needs to fill if they are going to have some breakout GS developer stars who get headlines for making money with their apps...which in turn will bring droves of other possible developers to the product.
Fortunately both of these are doable changes to make to the tool they could make to the tool (not easy, but possible). I hope they are priorities 1 and 1a.
The had a new team take over development of the engine at the beginning of the year (Luma) and they're pretty sharp. The community manager is working with us on an SDK 4 bug that just popped up - friendly and attentive so far, I'll let you know more after I see it resolved. )
Truthfully I feel for the iTorque team and the GS team - community management, support and technical development are not easy to all do great on a limited budget and sales of these engines don't generate a huge amount of revenue. But one of them is going to do all 3 well and win (and generate much more revenue as a result) and I hope to be with them on the ride to get there.
I'd much, much rather pay $500 or $1,000 for a GS or iTorque that had some of the key features that are missing right now and had great support.
amigoni said: Well, I just purchased the Corona license before the price goes up. I love GS and I am learning Corona. It doesn't seem to hard. Frankly I think I will be using both. GS for prototyping is great, but corona seems really fast too. In just two hours of learning I already have my background scene up from my main project in GS. Now the hard stuff starts though. All the crazy logic that you can easily drag and drop and move in GS.
I think GS really was and is a huge help in learning how to build a game. I would have never started without it. So I am happy to stay here while also working with Corona. I hope one day GS will be my only stop, but I can't face customers that have paid and the game crashes. Especially since I can't do anything about it. I have run my business for 7 years and that is not a fun position to be in. You can ruin your reputation with things that are totally out of your control.
Without a stable product GS will have to stay for prototyping for now. Great great tool. Hopefully the update will make it stable.
How are you learning to use it? I have no idea where to start.
In other correspondence with the dev team on the subject of 'pause', it was suggested that making an actor 'pause-able' could result in a performance hit. (indeed, there were suggestions from the community that you could un-tick the pause function much like 'moveable' in an actor to get round this).
If there *is* a performance hit:
*Will we be able to pick which actors are affected by pause?
*Will using pause mean that the performance increases mentioned in this Big Picture will be nullified?
*Will using pause *not* affect performance at all?
*Are we just getting 'Preserve Scene' back?
Just wondering if there's any clarification available on this?
In truth, it is refreshing to know that the performance is still the focus since that is one of the greatest points of concentration of a lot of customers and also the reviewers.
Game Salad is a great prototyping tool, but I don't see it as a viable engine choice as long as there is no ability to create IN APP PURCHASES. Of all the things I would like to see, thats the one I think is the most pressing now that iADD support is in.
joemauke said: Game Salad is a great prototyping tool, but I don't see it as a viable engine choice as long as there is no ability to create IN APP PURCHASES.
In App purchases would be great, but it also depends on what type of game you are making.
Its currently in private Alpha 3...but due out anytime now. It basically adds the core box2D physics to Corona.
GameSalad still beats Corona hands down in speed of development...but the bugginess and lack of GE optimization and RAM resource bloat of GS is wearing on me week by week. I hope this next update of GS is a good one! GS will still be my first go to platform...if it can do the duty...but if not...we will be forced to look elsewhere and rely on GS for proof of concept or prototyping.
Just thought I would throw in a few advice for those looking to get into ITGB or ITorque. I am currently an owner of Untiy Pro 3.0 (Iphone and Android as well), and ITGB along with other various Torque products. If you search for Ecliptic Entertainment on the iTunes store you will see a free puzzle slider game I created using images from several companies I had connections with.
Now... I left ITGB due to the bugs, poor performance, lack of support on forums, among other things to come to GameSalad for rapid production. I can honestly say without any hesitation the switch will NEVER NEVER EVER be regretted. GameSalad has yet to prove poor performance in comparison to the other engines I mentioned above. Granted the types of games I think GameSalad is good for currently is not a full fledge shooter, or something with intense graphics.
I would recommend anyone who is looking to use a different engine to question why they are looking and what features they are looking for. All these engines have their strengths. GS is easy and fast to product products with, ITGB is open source for modifications, Unity is solid performance and strong capabilities with good features but is not open source.
Anyhow, I look forward to see what GS brings in the future and I for one don't mind going to a professional license for 1000 dollars, if there are more features added of course.
I tried Unity a while ago. I found it to be very interesting indeed, and very powerful. The tutorials were amazing if I remember rightly.
I could place stuff in a scene, and make things look pretty, but that was as far as I got with it before my trial ran out (I'm not very clever, and this was before it was 'unlimited time free'!).
Corona certainly looks interesting. But again, I'm held back by the code stuff. I love that I can imagine what I can do in GameSalad, and have results incredibly quickly! Something I would not be able to do with Corona without additional time investment.
Which could instead be spent making a game with GS
@danlbryant I 'guestimated' that it would be out at the end of the first week of September. More likely, it'll be second week I reckon.
Very much looking forward to it!
There's 'kind of' a roadmap in the first post on this thread - Gamecentre, social network stuff etc - but !@#$% happens in development and things get delayed. At least there's a 'rough' idea of where they're going at the moment...
Comments
I think GS really was and is a huge help in learning how to build a game. I would have never started without it. So I am happy to stay here while also working with Corona. I hope one day GS will be my only stop, but I can't face customers that have paid and the game crashes. Especially since I can't do anything about it. I have run my business for 7 years and that is not a fun position to be in. You can ruin your reputation with things that are totally out of your control.
Without a stable product GS will have to stay for prototyping for now. Great great tool. Hopefully the update will make it stable.
--------------------
Case Study - "The Incident" game app
As far as I can tell, many prominent review sites have featured this game, quite a number with rave reviews. I have not really heard anything really negative about it so far from those articles that mention it.
Looking closer however will reveal that:
1. It does not support all orientations on iPad
- this is a reason for Apple to automatically reject iPad apps, normally
- it does not even support the reversed landscape orientation
2. It has no leaderboards, no OpenFeint or any of that sort of thing
I think many developers here would love to have the kind of exposure "The Incident" is getting and they managed to get away with it with some glaring omissions. It might even be said that GameSalad is mostly capable of assembling such a game.
--------------------
Perhaps we should look beyond the limitations and realise that it is still entirely possible to come up with something fun and capable of worldwide acclaim, when effort and creativity and marketing and what else all come together. I have a feeling that its less about the tool (GameSalad) and more about everything else in the mix with a huge dollop on creatively engaging your audience.
Of course, I will never be able to make certain kinds of games with GameSalad, but I would be really happy if one of mine makes it like "The Incident". And I have a feeling that it's really possible. At least with GameSalad, I have a chance.
I have no such chance with Xcode. ^_^
@amigoni: I agree with using as many tools as you can. The more options you have at your disposal, the better.
If somebody wanted to "graduate" from GameSalad and move on to the next engine, then I would recommend iTorque 2D, not Corona.
Torque has things that are familiar to a GameSalad user, most importantly, Actors and Scenes.
Those might seem like basics, but a lot of environments don't have them.
For example, Corona does not have Scenes. You only have one Scene to work with.
Which is fine for a simple game, but that gets to be a nightmare for something more complex.
Take my game Danger Cats! as an example. With GameSalad, I could rapidly lay out all the levels in the game by dragging Actors into position where I want them. I can quickly tweak them as well to my hearts content.
If I wanted to do that in something like Corona, I would make all my levels external text documents. I would type in all the positions of all the elements of the level. box1.x = 200. box1.y = 168. etc.. etc... for EVERY element in the Scene.
I would be positioning everything blind. Each level would be hundreds of lines of code for all the attributes of all the elements.
The other option is to stack everything in the game on top of each other and turn their visibility on/off depending on what "scene" you are in.
Now, the new 'game edition' version of Corona might have the concept of Scenes, but I doubt it. I believe they just added Box2D and OpenFeint. It is a more robust version of Box2D than GameSalad's, but you have to type everything.
Torque gives you a graphical editor to lay out all your actors and levels, just like GameSalad.
You set up all their positions, attributes, etc. - but then you control them with code.
It also has a particle engine and a physics engine, etc.
And TorqueScript is robust, you can pretty much create anything you want.
I bought Torque Game Builder 4 years ago, when they were still owned by GarageGames. I only got as far as creating a menu system in it, but it was still a few thousand lines of code. The iTorque 2D engine is an add-on to Torque 2D - which is what I have. iTorque costs an additional 400$ or so. The whole thing costs 750$, and you also get the complete source code with it, so you can add things like iAds or OpenFeint or whatever you want. You have to do it yourself, but you can add them.
And I don't mean to bash Corona in any way, it is very powerful, and very cool software. It's just going to be tough to create complicated games with it at first.
But I STILL prefer GameSalad to any of these engines. The speed at which I can make games with GameSalad is so exciting to me. It keeps my morale up to see things working so fast. And most importantly, I have the most fun using it.
FINALLY!
Great Big Picture!
I'm glad to hear that there is a lot more coming too!
@Yodapollo I was wondering what you meant with "daily features":
DragonFire SDK - develop on Windows
Game Editor Pro - multiplatform, recently ported from Windows
Orx Portable Game Engine
GLBasic
No iOS development yet, but to watch out for:
REAL Studio 2010
YoYo Games Game Maker for Mac
It's powerful, but the scripting language is not very fast on the devices, you pretty much have to go to C scripts in conjunction with it to make it really hum, so it hasn't been the "quick easy to learn for non-programmers" shortcut we thought it would be. Not at all.
Yes, we have OpenFeint integrated, which is huge, and I don't think we could have quite pulled off the game we have now with GS, but it has been a LONG development process and we have a C programmer working with us as well.
That's why I've been spending time here at GS the past week. Either GS will be a great prototyping tool or a development tool as well. I really hope for the latter. If they don't fill this niche someone else will.
More than anything I'm concerned with two things for GS:
1) What happened with Bumps. They made it into the top 25 and got bashed for crash/slow performance issues. That alone could stop us in our tracks from developing with GS. You can't have slow performance, you just can't. Maybe it was the developers, but it sounds like it was more the GS engine than anything.
2) Lack of OF, GameCenter or other viral spread opportunities. This is a big part of how top games stay top games. If people like GS games they have no quick, easy way to spread that to their friends. This is a major hole that GS needs to fill if they are going to have some breakout GS developer stars who get headlines for making money with their apps...which in turn will bring droves of other possible developers to the product.
Fortunately both of these are doable changes to make to the tool they could make to the tool (not easy, but possible). I hope they are priorities 1 and 1a.
Truthfully I feel for the iTorque team and the GS team - community management, support and technical development are not easy to all do great on a limited budget and sales of these engines don't generate a huge amount of revenue. But one of them is going to do all 3 well and win (and generate much more revenue as a result) and I hope to be with them on the ride to get there.
I'd much, much rather pay $500 or $1,000 for a GS or iTorque that had some of the key features that are missing right now and had great support.
In other correspondence with the dev team on the subject of 'pause', it was suggested that making an actor 'pause-able' could result in a performance hit. (indeed, there were suggestions from the community that you could un-tick the pause function much like 'moveable' in an actor to get round this).
If there *is* a performance hit:
*Will we be able to pick which actors are affected by pause?
*Will using pause mean that the performance increases mentioned in this Big Picture will be nullified?
*Will using pause *not* affect performance at all?
*Are we just getting 'Preserve Scene' back?
Just wondering if there's any clarification available on this?
Cheers,
QS
Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quantum_Sheep
Web: https://quantumsheep.itch.io
Correction:
inApp purchases would be great if they are an express version feature.
I ask again...
Why is there need for a pro version of GS?
Correction:
Corona is $99 and it has everything the pro version of GS has....PLUS SOME (at least once the Game Ed. comes live)!
Plus the Corona price jumps to $250 next month (probably because of the sched. Game Ed. release).
I've been studying my Lua syntax...have you?
What is Game Ed.?
http://anscamobile.com/game-edition/
Its currently in private Alpha 3...but due out anytime now.
It basically adds the core box2D physics to Corona.
GameSalad still beats Corona hands down in speed of development...but the bugginess and lack of GE optimization and RAM resource bloat of GS is wearing on me week by week. I hope this next update of GS is a good one! GS will still be my first go to platform...if it can do the duty...but if not...we will be forced to look elsewhere and rely on GS for proof of concept or prototyping.
Now... I left ITGB due to the bugs, poor performance, lack of support on forums, among other things to come to GameSalad for rapid production. I can honestly say without any hesitation the switch will NEVER NEVER EVER be regretted. GameSalad has yet to prove poor performance in comparison to the other engines I mentioned above. Granted the types of games I think GameSalad is good for currently is not a full fledge shooter, or something with intense graphics.
I would recommend anyone who is looking to use a different engine to question why they are looking and what features they are looking for. All these engines have their strengths. GS is easy and fast to product products with, ITGB is open source for modifications, Unity is solid performance and strong capabilities with good features but is not open source.
Anyhow, I look forward to see what GS brings in the future and I for one don't mind going to a professional license for 1000 dollars, if there are more features added of course.
-Ecliptic
I wish GS had a roadmap like corona!
I tried Unity a while ago. I found it to be very interesting indeed, and very powerful. The tutorials were amazing if I remember rightly.
I could place stuff in a scene, and make things look pretty, but that was as far as I got with it before my trial ran out (I'm not very clever, and this was before it was 'unlimited time free'!).
Corona certainly looks interesting. But again, I'm held back by the code stuff. I love that I can imagine what I can do in GameSalad, and have results incredibly quickly! Something I would not be able to do with Corona without additional time investment.
Which could instead be spent making a game with GS
@danlbryant
I 'guestimated' that it would be out at the end of the first week of September. More likely, it'll be second week I reckon.
Very much looking forward to it!
There's 'kind of' a roadmap in the first post on this thread - Gamecentre, social network stuff etc - but !@#$% happens in development and things get delayed. At least there's a 'rough' idea of where they're going at the moment...
QS
Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quantum_Sheep
Web: https://quantumsheep.itch.io
For more information on what a scenegraph is, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenegraph