My Story with GameSalad - The Beginning and the End.
beefy_clyro
Member Posts: 5,394
Hi All,
Since it's Valentines day, I thought i'd share a love story with you, my first love for a game making sdk ... This is my Love story for GameSalad.
Growing up I always had a passion for computer games. I remember the best thing was going to the carboot with my folks and coming across 'that guy' who would be selling commodore 64 cassettes. With great anticipation, every week i picked my new game. Some were terrible, some never worked and some were my fix for the week. I developed a love for games and always had the dream of one day making my own!
I'm not a genius, i'm not thick as s**t, I just never applied myself. I learnt how to get by in life doing the bare minimum. I never learnt how to code. Now i know if i was to push myself I could and I could of maybe went and studied computer science or something and who knows where i'd be now ... but I never, so its not worth going down that route.
In 2007, the first iPhone was released and it sat well with me ... I purchased one and had it imported from the US to the UK. As I used this and continued on in the Apple ecochain I started to dream again about making games, only this time, I didnt need to do it for a console, the 'new generation' would be these smartphones. I set about exploring ideas and methods and here is where I came across GameSalad. It was everything I had been looking for, a no coding solution that would work on mobile. It was at this time I fell in love with the small community that was present at the time, everyone was helpful and everyone pushed one and other ... I had generally never experienced an online community like it.
In 2010 I released my first game for Apple ... It was terrible! I worked on 2 side by side, a 'Call of Duty' spoof called 'COD' and an 'Office Racing' game which had a good idea behind it but a bad execution ... If only you knew what you know now from the offset right?
Fast forward 4/5 years and I was releasing my last game! Milieu - A thoughtful, engaging puzzle game! I then continued to work on some other ideas but had not released any more! My life changed a bit, I got a more demanding job, a mortgage and I found my time had diminished. I let my GameSalad pro expire with the view of continuing at some point but this never happened. December 2016, my first born, my son Jackson! Time is no longer my friend and I knew my dream had ended! Apple began to remove my older games for not complying with the recent requirements and in January 2017 I let my Apple membership expire!
I had a lot of ups and downs with GameSalad, the bugs, the memory leaks, honestly only the old will remember having to literally save after every rule change and restart the software, the debacles like Graphene and other wasted ventures, banging my head against the proverbial wall trying to get features added but you know what ... I Love(d) GameSalad. I could of went to Corona, GameMaker, Stencyl or any of the other 2d engines but GameSalad had a hold of me, when it worked, everything made sense to me and it all just felt like Home to me!
Above all else, GameSalad allowed me to fulfil a childhood dream, not many things out there could allow someone to do such a thing so kudos to you GameSalad!
In memory of my development coming to an end, I was reorganising all my files and decided to make a demo reel of the majority of games I released and some work in progress games that never saw the light of day! Its a nice way to view the years of hard work and joy it gave me! You'll have to excuse the poor quality of the video recordings going back 7 years 
Although I would advise switching the below video to HD as its still better than viewing at like 360p lol
Looking at all my games, Line Ar(X) is still my favourite, especially coding wise, there's some great bits of maths in there! I also like Milieu and LAD, they're probably my top 3.
I've met some great developers, some wonderful artists and created a mix of games/apps and forged some friendships along the way!
Ahhhhh memories ...
Comments
Very best of luck in the future - and congratulations on Jackson !!
Great post! My story would be very similar. And to think I started coding like this when I was about eight:
10 PRINT "Do you (1) go into the cave or (2) go around the cave?"
20 INPUT "Your choice: ", CHOICE
30 IF CHOICE=2 : GOTO 60
40 PRINT "There is a bear. It eats you. You die."
50 GOTO 100
60 PRINT "You go around. You found the treasure chest! It is filled with pencils! You win!"
100 PRINT "Game Over."
Yes, this was a Betsy DeVos childhood story.
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Ah, Line Ar(X), LAD and Milieu were fantastic games. I remember playing the heck out of Line Ar(X) and waiting with great anticipation for LAD. Loved the way you cared for the games you created. It really showed. Best of luck to you, Beefy! Please make sure to pop back every once in a while.
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Great Story Beefy. Congrats on your first child. Time will return and we all hope you do too. As Braydon said, be nice to see you pop back once in a while.
Great Story, Good Luck!
Good luck Beefy!
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Cheers Socks! Hope to see you release a game soon
Amazing! My experience of anything like that went .. Select (2), Goto 60 .. Nope nope nope, I didnt let go yet, i'm going back ... I select (1) ... yaaay go me.
Oh I will, I still visit to see what's going on around here.
Thank you
Cheers guys, all the best
Wow those are some great games!
Great stuff! Congrats on Jackson and all the best for the future ...
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I tried developing with a young family. It was impossible. BUT when my boy was four I had a great reason and inspiration to develope games. You might want to develop games for your kids some day.
This isn't goodbye. Perhaps "see you later".
Your family comes first. Lucky kid.
Best of luck.
Thank you!
Many Thanks
Lovely way to think about it. I'll still visit the forums and hopefully can get back to game making in the future!
Excellent.
There's a saying that it's not the end, just a good bye ... for now. Seven years on and I've logged back in, maybe there's another chapter to my story with GameSalad, just reading through some forum posts and looking at old topics, the memories have come flooding back in :)
Jackson is now seven and loves spending time gaming (in appropriate moderation) and I'm debating embarking starting all over and creating a game with him, his first look into all things game development.
So for now, to all I have not seen around here before and for any old members still around this community, hello :)
Welcome back beefy_clryo!
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So looking at this thread, I had a saved and unposted comment about how happy and sad this post made me, congratulating you for Jackson, and a note that maybe one day you'll be back to start making games with him! Welcome back!
Thank you :)
Aw bless you, thank you! Funny how things sometimes go full circle. Good to see you're still hear :)