Trying to Learn GameSalad

We had a choice to choose between learning another 3D gaming engine called CryENGINE, which had beautiful graphics or learn a 2D gaming engine.  I have always been curious to learn a bit more about 2D gaming so I choose to try out GameSalad.

Here is what I was able to do before we continued to our last project.

GameSalad has a drag and drop workflow feel to it.  You create actors (players, scenery, etc.), drag and drop behaviors(movement, speed, physics, etc.) onto them, and then drag and drop the actor into your initial scene(the blank black box with the red cross hair). 

I decided to try to learn as much as possible about GameSalad by making the game itself simple.  I only used cubes.  I wanted to make something like a Super Mario Bros platformer.  I was able to make three sections.  It was made into a template where you could make the game into a touch screen app.

 By clicking on the yellow(left) and red(right) boxes you could move your player(blue cube) left and right.

By pressing the space bar you could get your cube to jump.

I also was able to make a killbox.  A killbox is just an invisible barrier placed anywhere in the level that is there just in case you fall off the cliff.  When you touch the killbox you die and respond at the beginning of the level.

I also was able add a sound effect for jumping and a sound effect for falling off the cliff.

In addition to a killbox(an invisible barrier that kills you), you can also create other invisible objects to fulfill various functions in your scene.

For example, if you don't want your player to be able to accidentally leave the scene, you have to create a barrier to stop them.  I wanted my player to move from left to right so I created an invisible wall(on the left) to prevent them from moving left.

Another example, would be creating an invisible barrier that takes you to the next section of the level.  I was able to use another box, make it invisible, and program it to change the scene when the player came into contact with it.

A problem that you may come across, when transitioning from one scene to another, is where your player will appear in the next scene.  You need to attach a behavior to invisible (change scene) barrier telling it where to place you where you would naturally be placed when moving into the next scene.

Once a player jumped to the top of the platforms, I placed another invisible(change scene) barrier at the top to take them to the next section of the level.  In this section I wanted to make an enemy AI (whitish gray cube) who could move around and hurt the player, but I wanted to make it so you could kill the enemy by jumping on its head.  I found a tutorial that helped you to accomplish this, but by this time we were already moving on to our final project.

Now this may seem incredibly simple, and in some ways it is, but it can get quite confusing when you are trying to figure out what behaviors make the actors in your scenes act the way you want them to.  Here is an example of just the player actor.

There are even more behaviors, attached to the player than these, but I decided just to show you a portion of it in these 3 screenshots.

I would like to continue to mess around with GameSalad some day.  It is, for the most part, fairly simple to get the hang of and fun to play around with.  For our last project though, we have decided to form teams and pick one game engine to try to make a game with.  5 others and I have decided to make a game using Unity.  You should be able to find out about the progress I've been making by following my "Quest for GDA" blog.

I made a quick video showing you the working game play that I was able to make, when I was working with Gamesalad.