GameSalad Beginner’s Guide

GameSalad is as an easy to use Game development platform that can be used to develop games without having to write any code. That way, with GameSalad, you don’t have to worry about debugging and testing. Once you learn to use GameSalad, you will be able to build games within days.

GameSalad Beginner’s Guide will give you a detailed overview of the tool and teach you how to use it to build your best game along with the author’s very own tips and tricks to design an interesting game. This book will take you through the different steps of building a game with GameSalad. As an example, the book will build three games that will enable you to work on any kind of game with GameSalad.

The book begins with some tips from the author to design a game that everyone will want to play and how to plan for it. Then we move on to setting up GameSalad and building projects in it. Once the tool is set up, the book moves on to creating and working with sprites.

The next section of the book includes building a whole ball drop game including gravity, touch controls, triggers and particle effects. The second game that the book builds is the space defender. It includes building an interesting user interface, enemies, explosions, space ship movements and testing this game on iDevices.

The third game is Metal Mech. This chapter includes sound effects, particle explosions, and numerous enemies, setting up Game Center Leader boards, and getting ready for App store. The last section of the book discusses how to get started with developing for iDevices.

What you will learn from this book

• Planning and designing an original game
• Creating storyboards and detailing characters and the story of the game
• Create new projects, and get familiar with Actor Behaviours, Keyboard Controls, Collisions and how to preview your game without deploying it to a device, and prototyping your game, putting your idea together with no complexities just to see if it all works
• Design sprites and import them into GameSalad for use in their game; how to trigger a sound effect, and how to make use of GameSalad’s particle engine to spruce up the overall look of your game
• Create the canvas of the game finished and add behaviours to the actors
• Add gravity, physics, and collisions to your game along with touch controls
• Creating user Interface and button & touch controls
• Wrapping Actors around levels and controlling their movements
• Adding sound effects and getting your game ready for the App store

Approach
This book is a step-by-step, tutorial-driven guide to game development using GameSalad. You will learn through first-hand experience how a GameSalad developer goes from literally nothing to a finished game. Along the way there are illustrations to explain anything that could be difficult and to display screenshots of the games. In addition, every art and audio asset required by the tutorials is provided, so you can start building your game right away.

Who this book is for
If you are a game enthusiast, who is looking to build games with GameSalad quickly, then this book is for you. You need not know any programming. The book does not deal with GameSalad’s installation and basic set up. The ideal reader would know how to install and set up GameSalad.