Let’s get to it shall we?
In order for you to run GameSalad and create amazingly awesome games, you must meet the minimum system requirements, which are as follows:
If your computer exceeds these requirements, perfect! If not, you will need to upgrade your computer. Keep in mind, these are the minimum requirements, having a computer with better specs is recommended.
Let’s start by downloading GameSalad and registering for an account. Let’s go to GameSalad’s website, www.gamesalad.com. Click the “Download Free App – GameSalad Creator” button.
While you are waiting for GameSalad to download, you should sign up for a free account. At the top of the page click Sign Up, enter your email address and create a username and password. You have two options for GameSalad membership, you can keep the Basic Pricing, which is completely free or select Professional Pricing. The difference is when you publish your App, you will have a Created with GameSalad splash screen, not a big deal right? Especially, not when you can get this awesome program for free! The Professional Pricing, which is $499 (USD) per year gives you all the features of the free version of GameSalad, plus it allows you to use iAds, Game Center, Promotional Links, your own Custom Splash Screen, and Priority Technical Support.
This does not include your Apple developer cost, which is $99 a year
Other tools that are recommended for game development:
Once you open GameSalad, you are presented with several options on the screen.
Following are the options:
For now, let’s click New | My Great Project
This is a fresh project; everything is empty. You can see that you have one level so far, but you can add more at a later time. See the Scenes and Actors Tabs? Currently, Scenes is selected, this shows you all of your levels, but if you click the Actors tab, you will be able to see all your actors (or game objects, characters, collectables, and so on.) in the game. You can also rearrange all of the actors in Actor Tags, to give you an idea of what these are useful for. Take for example, if you have 30 different enemies, when you are setting up your collisions within behaviors, you won’t have to set up 30 different collisions. Rather, when you set up all the enemies within a tag named Enemies you can do a single collision behavior for all actors of the tag! This reduces a lot of time when coding. We will get into more detail about actor tags, when we get into creating some games later in the book.
If you double-click on the Initial Scene, you will be taken to the level editor. Before we do that, let’s go through the buttons shown in the following screenshot:
The descriptions of the buttons in the previous screenshot are as as follows:
Seems pretty easy, right? It is! GameSalad’s user interface is simple. Even if you don’t know what a certain button does, just hover your mouse over the button and a tooltip appears and tells you what the button does. Even though it’s a very simple user interface, it is very powerful. Take for example, something as simple as the Enable Resolution Independence option. Simply selecting this takes out a lot of time from having to create two sets of images, a high resolution retina-friendly image, and a lower quality set for non-retina display images. With this option, all you have to do is create a high resolution set. Choose this option and GameSalad automatically creates a lower quality set of images for non-retina devices. How great is that? Such a simple option and yet it saves so much time and effort, and isn’t simplicity what everyone wants?
Double-click our initial scene and you will see the Scene Editor, yes it may be a little daunting, but once you get used to the user interface, it is really quite simple. Let’s break down all the buttons and see what they do:
What do all these buttons mean? Following is a description of all the buttons and boxes:
There we go! The GameSalad interface really is that easy to navigate! In this article, you set up an account with GameSalad, you downloaded and installed it and now you know how to use the interface. GameSalad has such a simple interface, but it is really powerful. As we looked at earlier, an option as simple as Resolution Independence is so easy to select and yet one click takes off so much time from creating different sets of images that can be used for developing. This is what makes GameSalad so great; it’s such a simple user interface and yet it is so powerful. What is so amazing about all of it, is that there’s no programming involved whatsoever! For those who don’t have the smartness to program a full game, this is what everyone else wants, simple, quick, and super powerful.
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