Where to start? Immediately after my last posting, within minutes, a team mate's level he'd been working on crashed. What's worse was that upon re-opening the project there was nothing, I mean nothing, left of the project. It had been completely erased. And yes, he had been saving his project. Not a scratch of the file was left. It was a completely white screen.
I experienced something less serious a couple days earlier. When the program crashed on me and I went to re-open the project it opened to an earlier stage and I lost a day’s worth of work. Beta!
Here's the first bit of advice for this entry, save, but more than save, save different versions so that you can recover something even if it's a few steps back from where you were.
I did download and play with the VML iDevices app from iTunes. I'm excited to have that handy tool with regards to determining X & Y coordinates on my screen. Kudos to VML, out of the UK, for creating this handy device.
I also came across an app called PositionApp that helps to chart an app's popularity and reveal new apps that join the iTunes app store. It looks at all genres. "PositionApp is the world's most in-depth, intuitive app discovery and performance tracking tool available today...it offers instant remote access to all chart positions of the top 300 apps." It looks like a pretty cool app.
Both apps are free and found at iTunes app store.
As for my own issues with GameSalad, I have yet to solve my spawning issue. By every account, my actor should be able to spawn another actor, but alas no. I've thought of all the time I've worked on this and I feel that I've lost some of the advantage I thought I gained in working with GameSalad to that of learning Xcode. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on this one issue. But, I want to solve this issue. I chalk up my difficulties to my lack of experience, regardless of the quirkiness of the program itself.
Mind you, I've yet to create the mirrored levels I need, by positioning the actor in different places on the screen and performing the same actions. I've yet to discover how to have my actor launch itself to a designated area of the screen, have that area receive an action and change the HUD (heads-up display). All this stands in front of me, while I lose time on the action of spawning.
The cannon ball template most closely resembles my game (a little bit), but I'm having a miserable time reverse engineering it to figure out how it works. I don't need a camera following my actor or particles, so I think there are less detailed things about my game. I return to the grind.
This entry is brief because not much has changed. I trudge on with my building.
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Totally feeling your pain!!!
ReplyDeleteI learned about gamesalad.com from a mobile development workshop hosted by our local tech group Panma.org - and was blown away at how easy it was to author great looking apps.
Two monthes later, I still don't have any idea how to crank out apps from the IDE - after being instructed on how to do it!
I'm enjoying the Lyndia.com movies as well; but as a designer, it's very opaque from what I'm used to!
Keep up the struggle - and remember - good programmers ship! See you in the App store!
Howdy Nick. I just loooove getting feedback! And of course, I can commiserate with you on the frustration with GameSalad. My latest entry is merging levels from different computers. If you need to do that PLEASE read that first and save yourself a ton of grief or at least go in prepared. Yes, we definitely plan to ship and hope to this month. I'll be blogging about it for sure.
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