Apps Made Easy: GameSalad Part 1

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GameSalad Generation App is a fun way  for developers to take on a challenge and Gamesalad is a great way to get started! GameSalad is an authoring tool that enables developers to compose games in a drag-and-drop-fashion; with the use of  visual editor  and behavior based logic systems. If you are non-programmer Gamesalad is a great way for you to get involved with the developer gaming community and bring your awesome ideas to life. On the other hand if you are a programmer, GameSalad is a great way for you to launch rapid-prototypes to test in the store before building in HTML&JS , XAML&C# etc.

The GameSalad Community of which I am member(@LadyNaggaga) of is a wealth of information on how to get started. As I  new member I have used angry-anna-game

the community forum to learn new techniques, post questions , and answer a couple as well. The Game collection on the Game Salad website is great place to see the amazing game building possibilities that this tool  has to offer. I was inspired to dabble in GameSalad after playing Angry Anna 2.0 by geekmentors. An Angry Birds based game Angry Anna is inspired by Kisan Baburao Hazare popularly know as Anna Hazare fight against corruption in India.  Who said games can’t be fun, political and educational!

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After playing Angry Anna multiple times yesterday, I decide to see how far I could get building my own game today.  I decided to start with a basic shooting game based on the GameSalad template Basic Shoot Em up. What I liked about this particular template is it is a quick guide on how to use the actors and behaviors in Gamesalad.

Escape from Mars is a basic 2D shooting game that has my heroine the astronaut fighting the Martians in her quest to return to earth.  The player uses the left, right, up and down keys to move their heroine around the screen. The aim of the game is to have the heroine shoot the Martians and finally the orange spaceship to win the game. Once the player has completed their ask the level is complete(please stay tuned for the upcoming levels). The storyboard below was what I was able to develop this Sunday afternoon(1/13/13).

Escape from Mars Storyboard

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The last entry for this blog post  is going to show you how make your heroine(actor) left, right, up and down across your stage. Before I continue on how to move your heroine(actor), I assume that you have read pages 1-13 of the GameSalad Manual. It is important to understand the use of  the library, stage and backstage elements of the tool.

Moving an Actor

Before you start adding rules and behaviors to an actor make sure that you have selected the astronaut. You would have noticed that the backstage section of your tool would have gone from blank to white screen allowing the you create a rule, group or  timer.

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 Steps

  • 1. Click create a new rule.

  • 2. Under When: Drag the Key condition from the library section.

  • 3. Under do: Drag the Move behavior.

  • Filling in the blanks

We want to make sure that every time the player presses the up key, it is recognized. To accomplish this in the receives a key press  text simply press the up key. To move the actor up enter 90 in the move in direction. Click play to test. As you must have noticed as you continue to press the up key, the actor disappears off the screen. Let’s fix that .

Restricting the Actors movement

Drag the attribute condition  under the when in the rule.

Filling in the blanks

1. Make sure that the position actor is know. Click on the a drop down box and select

Attributes –> astronaut –> Position –> Y the end result should read self.position.y .

2.  Set the operator to < (less than)

3.  Make sure that the expression editor is less than height of the scene. In my case my scene is 320 so, I set  it 300. 

 

Now do the same for all the other directions and simply change the key stroke, move direction ,and attribute values.  Stay tune of shooting and explosions.

 

Acknowledgement:  All art for this game was done by Sara Summers.