Social game producer, community manager & freelance writer

So, I’m playing around with GameSalad tonight and my first attempt was just to be able to have an Actor on the screen that moves when I press a button and stops when I let go of that button.  It was surprisingly simple once I figured out that if you change behaviors and attributes on an actor, you have to delete it and place another new one.  Derp.

Let’s talk through exactly how I did this.  First of all, I had to change a couple settings on the scene itself.  This included changing the background behind the pony to white instead of black.  I also changed the “Wrap X” setting to true so that my pony would wrap back onto the left side when I went off the screen on the right.  That was a simple click of a button.  Next, I needed to create my actual pony that would move.

To create the pony, I created a new actor, then did a Google image search for a clip art of Rainbow Dash.  (if SOPA were to pass, I could get in lots of trouble for this by the way).  I dragged the image onto my actor and it was automatically set.  I then dragged my actor onto the background in the starting position.  Onto the behaviors!

First, I created a rule for my controls.  I made it so that the Actor was looking for a spacebar key press of “down”.  Once I created that, I need to tell GameSalad what I want the pony to actually DO when I press spacebar.  I put on an “Accelerate” behavior and changed the direction so it would move off to the right.  I didn’t change the Acceleration speed, I left it at the default of 100.  I then wanted to test out the debugging functionality of GameSalad so I put on a custom attribute on the pony of “isMoving” and made it a boolean so that it would be true or false.  I used the “Log Debugging Statement” on that rule as well, and told it to print out “self.isMoving” when I pressed down the spacebar.

So then I tested it.  I pressed down the spacebar and my pony ZOOMED off the right of the screen.  I stopped pressing the spacebar but the pony didn’t care — it kept zooming.  I figured I should put in a way to stop said Rainbow Dash pony.  Important, I know.  I created another rule for when the spacebar is UP instead of down.  In this rule, I added the behavior “Move” and changed the speed to 0, hoping that it would tell the actor to stop.  I deleted my actor and replaced it, and voila – it worked!  After I was done laughing my ass off at my creation, I decided I had to blog about it.  Here are the rules I made for reference:

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Ever since I first heard about GameSalad, I’ve been itching to try it out.  It’s a downloadable game creation tool for Mac that allows anyone to make HTML5, Android, and iOS games without needing to know any code.  It sounds right up my alley, because I don’t have the technical chops to make something with Unity or Love2D, but I have all sorts of ideas for little games I’d like to make.  It allows you to test out your games by beaming them to your iDevice, which is incredibly neat.

I signed up today and downloaded the software to my MacBook Pro, and was immediately overwhelmed.  Though when you’re creating a new project you can choose to start from a number of base templates (like platformer, adventure, shoot-em-up, etc.) I was still completely lost when I opened up the program.  I can tell immediately that I’m going to be fascinated by it.  It isn’t so dead simple that it allows for zero customization, yet it isn’t so techie that it requires use of scripting.  It has actors and scenes and attributes and properties, and everything you need to customize your game. So many options that I realized I should dive into the tutorials rather than try figuring out things on my own and getting frustrated.

The tutorials are a mix of text and video, and give you ‘points’ for completing them and answering a short quiz afterward.  The first tutorial walks you through the basic interface of the GameSalad Creator.  The second tutorial teaches about scenes, which are used to construct your game.  For example, your main menu can be a scene, then your first level can be a scene, your game over screen can be a scene, and so on.  Scenes have editable properties such as the screen resolution, what happens when an object leaves the screen (does it wrap) and whether your screen should auto-rotate when a player rotates their device.  Next is a tutorial about Actors, which are all of the items within the game. This can be powerups, your avatar, NPCs, environmental objects, etc.  Actors have all sorts of attributes that you can control, such as their rotation, their size, color, and their starting position.  They also have attributes that you cannot control, such as the length of time they have been in the scene.  I could see this being helpful for a game that requires you to tap something within a certain amount of time.  Interestingly, a scene has the same attribute so I could imagine that being used for a level with a time limit.  I could be wrong here though, I’m literally an hour in to my GameSalad experience at this point.

I’m not sure what kind of game I’m going to make first, but I think I’m going to do a very simple trivia game for my first attempt.  This might be ambitious because I don’t see any trivia game templates, but I think the concept is simple enough that I could figure out how to do it.  If not, I may scrap the idea.

I’m going to update on my progress with GameSalad, but for now I’m going to jump into more tutorials and make an honest attempt to create a few indie iPhone/iPad games this year.  More to come!

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