Announcing my first Project - Game title under consideration "Dangerous Cave HD"

immx

Hi guys, i hope i get a good welcome here on gamesalad forums.
I have been wanting to make a game with gamesalad for the past 2 years but i own a pc and that has been a major hindrance for me. but to my shocking surprise gamesalad released the windows creator beta and i will start using that to shape up my game.

Since i am new and i still have not used gamesalad uptill now, i have a few questions that id love to be answered, it would be of great help if some of you can answer them.

1. why is that now im seeing most of the people selling or making their games available for free on itunes? Do they not want to earn money? The game i am making would be of premium quality, a lot of content for 99cents. So if your game is pretty good, would i still have hard time competing with free software? im making this game to make money to be honest but it is my passion to make games as i have been a hardcore gamer since the commodore64 days and i have owned every gaming console as well as having a gaming pc.

2. ive read in the forums that performance is an issue with gamesalad, i have my material and the animations i have for my characters , as of now i have the animations at 60fps. What would be the ideal fps for a great game. i want the animation to be very smooth.

3. When it comes to naming my game do i have to get it copyrighted/trademarked? and if there has been a game with the name dangerous cave , and if i name my game as dangerous cave HD, will it be considered a different game title or not?

4. I do not want an overlay of controller on the iphone screen, rather id like to have a small area at the bottom of the screen to serve as a controller...does gamesalad offer that?

5. Do i have all the resources when it comes to making a game on a free version as opposed to the pro version?? i read the added benifits of the pro version but does the free version has EVERYTHING i need to make a game, or are there some game making features that only the pro version has?

6. can i have animated backgrounds in my game? i would love to as i have already designed animations for the game backgrounds.

7. In my game i would like 3 buttons, 1 for fire, 1 for jump and 1 for a jetpack. does gamesalad offer this type of custom button controller?

8. In my game can i have a powerup that makes my guy have a jetpack? i know these questions might sound stupid to you, but before i start making my game, id like to know what can be done and what cant be, as that is an essential part of my game and i dont want to start designing a level where the jetpack is to be used and i find out that such a thing is not a possibility in gamesalad.

My game is inspired by a very old title called dangeous dave. It was a game i grew up playing and loved it. Below is an attatched image of the games first intro level. I have placed johnny bravo as the main character as id like to reveal my character later on. The game would play a lot like gianna sisters and good platformers.

Images of the game that inspires my game:
http://www.google.com/search?q=dangerous+dave&hl=br&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=ZzjiT8_XJMWP-wadg6SoAw&ved=0CFAQsAQ&biw=1360&bih=664

Your help would be appreciated.

thanks and happy gaming

Image of my games first "intro level":
http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/3498/19166900.jpg

immx

guys how do i post a pic here along with my post?

FloridaGames

First of all, Welcome to the family . I apologize that you didn't get a very good welcome and your question has gone unanswered for this long. The forums is usually full of friendly people eager to help you out. But anyways, heres your answers:
1. Most people have made their games free because they are using ads in their game to make money. Secondly, yes it is very hard to compete with other 99 cent games as even some of the highest quality games are only a dollar. But its not impossible, there are a good handful of people here who make a living off this.

2.60 fps sounds like quite an animation, but gs should be able to handle it no problem. An ideal game should be running on about 40 fps I would say.

3. Dont worry about copyright problems. Apple takes care of all that. If you tried to infringe on somones copyright, they would stop you. And you should be fine adding "HD" to your title.

4. You can make any kind of controls you can think of with gamesalad .

5.Free version has everything you NEED to MAKE a game. Pro simply lets you promote you game, put in gamecenter, iap, ads, etc. Nothing that you NEED. *You DO however NEED an apple developer account to sell your game on itunes. this costs $100/year.

6.Animated Background is not a problem. Very simple to do.

7. Gamesalad does not have premade buttons like that, but those commands would be very easy to put in your game yourself.

8. Jetpack is also not a problem, someone already made a jetpack game called "jetpack joyride" there's a template you can buy http://www.deepblueapps.com/Deep_Blue_Ideas_Ltd./GSTemplateJTP.html deepblueapps is a great website for alot of gs tools/template/and games.
"gshelper.com" is also a great site for you to use, it shows you how to do alot of really cool things in gamesalad. The website is run by our leader, the almighty Tshirtbooth, if you ask a question on the forums %90 of the time he'll be the one to answer it.
Best of luck on your game, I would like to leave you with this piece of advice: never rush your game onto the appstore. Don't publish your game until you think theres not one thing you can do to make it better. Then wait a week and then if your absolutely positive the game is completely free of bugs and as great as you can make it then publish it. That is the key to success; polish, polish, polish.

Nmdogdude

Welcome, if you're ever confused about Gamesalad, visit the cookbook tab. There are also many tutorials on youtube.
Also by looking at your intro level, I would avoid using that character... it kinda looks like something I saw on CartoonNetwork a while back...

JustMe74

Also keep in mind that you can't publish to iTunes with the PC version of Gamesalad.

immx

@florida games thanks A LOT!!!! your answers were very thorough and exactly the kind of answers i needed, in fact they were EXACTLY what i wanted to know and so thorough that i do not have anything more to ask of you. Im digging the http://gshelper.com/ website. I am amazed to see how much progress gamesalad has made in the past year or so.

@Nmdogdude thanks for directing me and telling me about the cookbook tab... that would be very useful. I mentioned in the end of my note that i have placed a character "johnny bravo" instead of my own character intentionally as id like to reveal that character later on. It's okay though you probably missed that.

@JustMe74 thanks for telling me about the publishing, i knew that and have a mac at home that someone else uses, so i can use that for the publishing. Thanks for helping out

Guys please check out the announcement picture im attatching with this post.

http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/1539/dangerouscave.jpg

How can i post pics inside of the post??

Thanks guys and stay posted, Take Care.

immx

Another variation to the reveal:

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/2999/dchd.jpg

JohnPapiomitis

When you say fps are you talking about the fps the games running at, or you made your animations at 60 fps?

The highest fps you can set an animation at is 30 in gamesalad.

poorcollegedev

Is that Johny Bravo?

Nmdogdude

@immx sorry, I must've missed that.
Game looks cool.

immx

Hey guys, ready with the main character for the game. Please take a look and give feedback, the character is very simply drawn, because i want amazing funny animations with hilarious voice overs like duke nukem!!

http://imageshack.us/f/685/finalmax.jpg/

please click on the magnifying glass/zoom button to see in better detail. Thanks

immx

@JohnPapiomitis what i mean by 60 fps is that i made the animations in flash with a document setting of 60 fps and have 60 different images for one animation. I do know that a lot of game companies use 30 fps as a standard but i myself like to se 60fps as it looks lifelike and smooth. what do you think?

@poorcollegedev yes it is/was johnny bravo but he has been replaced by my character now which looks a lot like johnny. Whether you call it inspiration or copying, i have to do it to reduce development time. Im focusing more on funny animations, GAMEPLAY and funny voice overs.

@Nmdogdude thanks a lot

jckmcgraw

@immx

A little off topic but to answer one of your questions... to embed an image into the forum, you just have to use some simple HTML. Here are some simple snippets of code that I use pretty frequently as well... Pretend the  are less than or greater than signs.

img src="put the URL of your image here"/ (embedding an image)

a href="Put the URL of your link here"Replace this with what you want the link to say/a(custom links)

Since the apple symbols might confuse you even more, just have a look here:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_basic.asp

Hope this helps,
Jack McGraw

immx

@jckmcgraw thanks that was really helpful and somehow thats something every1 forgot to help me with

immx

immx

JustMe74

< img src="http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/685/finalmax.jpg"/ >

Remove the spaces after the < and before the >

immx

@JustMe74 i did that in the earlier post but it shows n empty post and says just "image"

JustMe74

Got to use the correct URL...

poorcollegedev

@immx no big deal! I was just wondering. I loved that show as a kid

immx

@JustMe74 arrite....thanks

immx

immx

immx

Main menu screen design, will be uploading some of the animations in a couple of days .

gyroscope

Hi @immx

With ref. to fps for animation, more often than not, 30fps is way over the top for cartoon like frames; you can get away with 20,15 or even 12fps or less sometimes, depending on what's being animated; it'll still look fine. (And not be such a burden on the engine).

immx

@gyroscope hi gyroscope, hope ur doing good. Thanks for the info, im new with gamesalad, to be honest i haven't even begun using gamesalad, im completing the game assets, and animation is something that is very important to me, im making the animations in flash cs5 and anime studio and i can make animations with any fps, and i definitely need help regarding an ideal number of images/frames i should keep for a game with gamesalad as i know that gamesalad has some performance issues. So what do you think is the IDEAL fps for a game like mine?? im a very quality conscious guy and i plan on making a very good platformer emphasizing mainly on gameplay than anything else. If i pick a FPS number for my main character, would i have to make the animations for all the other characters at the same FPS? i was thinking i should animate the main character with 30 images , whereas tha other characters would have 15 images per animation. whats your take on this??

immx

updated version of the main menu screen

Nmdogdude

To do animation in Gamesalad, you have to save each frame as an individual .png file and then use the animate behavior. 30 frames of animation should work smoothly but you'll need 30 frames for a walk left,walk right, and jump animation.

immx

@Nmdogdude thanks Nmdogdude, that is exactly how i am doing the animation, saving png files , walk left and right would just be the images flipped horizontally right? if you know of any good platformer designed with gamesalad that has different levels could you direct me to that? that would be great.

immx

hey guys is the animation any good? i need to improve the legs animation what do you think about the rest??

http://www.teamwriters.net/dv.html

gyroscope

Hi, as previously mentioned, for a smallish main player character/actors in general, 30 frames is way over the top. You can get away with 12 or even 10 frames every second...

There's the ready-made plat former that's been in GSC main dialog box for a long time; not sure it has more than 1 level though but it's got good plat former aspects to it: Platformer Template (between Alien Conquerers and Basic Shoot Em Up).

I really like your test animation; be even better with your leg movement tweaks!

PS I think the plat former template was made well before image flipping, so no need to bring in flipped images as separate files; just copy all the frames in the Inspector and flip them in their Actor Editor page.