Binary Cocoa Tries the Salad

Lately I’ve been trying GameSalad to make some games for the iPad. This has been an amazing experiment for me because it allows me to build something without having a lot of coding knowledge. So far I’ve been able to build a top down shooter and a runner where a dragon chases and eats you if you’re not quick enough. Here’s a cap of the dragon chaser:

As you can see, Sigmund the Dragon is chasing poor little Uther back to the castle from whence he came. It’s just a simple runner and it was pretty easy to put together by watching a couple tutorial videos. It runs pretty well and I’ve run into little problems.

The second game I’ve been assembling is a detective game where you shoot bad guys and get documents from computers spy style. Maybe you’re the bad guy in this game. Who knows? Here’s a screen cap:

Anyway, GameSalad has been pretty good to me so far. It’s not without its drawbacks however. It consumes a lot of memory if you have a lot going on and doesn’t deal well with getting rid of actors or entities or whatever you call them yet. So over time the game continually increases in size unless you reset the game. This mostly shows up in endless games and doesn’t affect games with levels very much. I also wish they would alphabetize their attribute lists so I can find things more easily.

Anyway! I would recommend GameSalad to anyone who wants to get into game dev but doesn’t have a vast amount of coding knowledge, like me. For those that know how to develop I would probably recommend looking for something more code friendly. Any thought on GameSalad? let us know!