Is GameSalad a viable choice again?

Bowhill Games

Hi Guys,

My niece is having some trouble using Unity due to the complex menu structure so I'm thinking of re introducing her to GS, the issue is last I used GS it was FULL of bugs and issues that had been there months with no sign of being fixed not to mention lacking in basic features of a 2d game engine.

I suppose I'm looking to get a sense if this has changed enough to recommend GS to her, though I don't want to recommend a tool that's broken or one she wont be able to monetize effectively.

Which statement would you most agree with

jamie_c

I hesitate to make any kind of recommendation either way but I will say that things have not changed much with the Macintosh or Windows version of the software as they have been spending a lot of their time working on the online, browser version that is directed at the education market.

-Timo-

Let's just say this. I am glad I worked with gamesalad for a few years but also really glad I moved on to different software (with real programming)

Twayne2

I would have voted the first but appently there are bugs with ads or somethingl ike that going on right now. Personally, I love Gamesalad and have no issues with it except it really can't do multiplayer and really not 3-d. Otherwise, there is almost no feat I feel like I can't accomplish. All I have to do is stick with a problem figure out a solution.
Well, there are probably a lot of things I can't do, but still there are a lot more things I can do. What bugs are you concerned about?

adent42

@Twayne2 Ad bugs are taken care of.

@Bowhill Games even though I have a vested interest in saying "yes it's awesome", I'm gonna answer with "it depends".

If you niece is having trouble with Unity, I would say yes! Basically GameSalad is a good intro to game logic. I know a number of game designers that went on to be Unity devs after starting with GameSalad. The high level design allowed in GS helped them reason about their code better. Some would, even after switching, implement an idea in GS first so they could figure out how they wanted to code it.

For commercial viability, I'd say that it really depends on the game. You're not gonna be building a big multiplayer game on this system, but you can do quite a bit with it and many commercial games are still being released with GameSalad. As with any tool, if you scope your project with the capabilities of the tool in mind, you'll see a lot more success. And if this is niece's first few games, I think the "limits" of GameSalad will help her concentrate on the right stuff (strong core gameplay, etc). In conjunction with the first point, she can always port her game if GameSalad becomes too limiting, but now with a stronger understanding of how to define game logic.

As for updates, I will be honest and say the engine has not been updated nearly as much as I or our users would want. We're still missing some "standard" 2D features like sprite sheet and sprite map support. We also need to do some work to get feature parity between the HTML5 game engine and the "native" game engine.

As a company, we've put a lot of our recent effort behind our new HTML5 based tool (which is currently an online only tool, but we're pushing to optimize to be a cross-platform desktop tool as well).

The tool rewrite had more-or-less blocked progress on the engine aside from the maintenance support work we have to do to keep current for OS updates, ad network updates, and recently a new feature to help developers deal with GDPR support.

The HTML5 based tools has a lot of cool features and UI updates like custom collision shape auto-tracing, a more "code-like" expression editor, and typing based autocomplete for selecting certain things in behaviors.

The good news is: after the launch of the HTML5 based tool to our education market, we can better balance tool and engine work again.

I'm hoping to do a State of GameSalad post soon that will outline some of the stuff I have in mind for the product in the next few months (I'm shooting for sometime next week).

PhilipCC

@adent42 As you may have noticed, I'm always shooting for something too!