gamesalad evaluation
TRANSCRIPT
Gamesalad Evaluation
Strengths The drag and drop principal of Gamesalad works very well and is extremely helpful. The overall layout is also very helpful, and can easily be learnt; by the end of the project I pretty much knew what all the behaviors available could do. I also really appreciate the user interface and how visual the software is. The idea of keeping all the elements and assets in boxes on the left, and then dragging them into different work areas on the right is very intuitive, and helped my keep track of what exactly I was doing in the program. The visual element also helped me get my head around programming principles, which I have always struggled with when thinking of it as code. The way each rule had a condition and action slot, helped be to very simply see what the process was, and how it would affect the game. Gamesalad has a very good and very helpful community, that provide many helpful tutorials, as well as responding to specific problems. Without the video tutorials found on Youtube we wouldn’t have been able to make the game as it is now, with tutorials helping us implement features such as the main character jumping, and sticking to moving platforms. After being stuck on something in our game glitching for a few days, we posted the issue on the Gamesalad forums, and very quickly got a problem solve. Difficulties One small detail I might pick out is the inability to zoom in or out when in scenes. This makes it hard to move really small actors, or get an overview of the whole scene design. Some actors need to be so small that it’s impossible to drag them, as their handles cover the area of the actor. Any attempt to drag it to a different position just shrinks or grows it, so the only way to move it is with the arrow keys. This is a slow and tedious process. In the process of making our game we had both home PCs and college Macbooks to use. Whilst Gamesalad does offer both Mac and PC versions, the two have very big differences that took a while to get used too. There is also no way to use one file in both versions, which became a nuisance during our game production, as we created the game as a PC file, so it could only be used on PC. Publishing the final game turned out to be quite a major problem in Gamesalad. Upon publishing a lot of glitches turned up in the game that were not present when we play tested the game within the software. It turned out the cause of this was that, when publishing Gamesalad ignores the “Off” tab on rules, meaning rules we had turned off in the program were now active. All this old rules turning back on really messed up our game, and we had to go through and delete them from the program. This seems like quite a big flaw in the publishing process.