Your feedback on this (free) template, please!

JB makin' a game

Hi there,

I've started GameSalad last summer and I feel like I'm getting the hang of it. At first I was somewhat insecure whether this was something for me, but pretty soon it became apparent that everything that I'll want to create is possible by using GameSalad and it's not a matter of if but when I figure new stuff out.

However, I have no programming knowledge worth mentioning, since this isn't even remotely close to my line of work. It's just a hobby I enjoy very much. The lack of knowledge makes me proud that certain stuff actually works after some puzzling, but it also leaves me wondering where there is room for improvement.

So I thought I'd post a template of something I was working on for my game anyway for some good old community feedback. Feel free to say anything you like (within the forum guidelines ), especially if you think some of the stuff can be improved. Also, if you think you can use (some of) the code, it's yours to use in one of your games.

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

• JB makin' a game

PS. The template is filled with notes to clarify stuff.

tatiang

Just a quick perusal of your template shows that it's well-crafted using tables and well-annotated which makes it useful for people who want to customize it and/or learn from what you've created. Thanks for sharing it!

RowdyPants

@JB makin' a game Looks nice! Descriptive comments in each section. Thanks for sharing work for others to learn. This kind of communal spirit makes the GS community great!

Two.E

Very Kind to share!
Honestly, sometimes the best part of any template is the notes attached. It is quite often we forget that everyone has their own logic building methods, and just having a few notes along the way helps create an overall picture of the logic. Great to see.

Nice work of tables.

• Two.E

JB makin' a game

Thanks for your feedback! You all mention the notes, probably because most of (?) the people don't write notes. Or maybe they do, but probably not as much as I do, lol.

I write tons of these notes for myself as well, to help me understand my own logic building from yesterday, tomorrow. People have asked me why I do this is English, because the notes are just for me (and I'm Dutch, btw). I kept telling them that one day it'll come in handy (and for this template, it did!), because English can be read by everyone on this forum and whether I write Dutch or English doesn't really matter to me. If anything, writing the notes in English is even more logical when referring to English named behaviors, etc.

Anyway, I copy-pasted most of the notes, because they weren't created for this template, they were just for me initially. That results in some faulty information. A small rectification:
It says that in the first actor's loop, it compares scene.name to the value in col 1 of the current row in the loop. If you check the table, however, it's just an integer 1, 2 or 3 (for the three scenes). The code I wrote was fine, I think, but setting text attributes from tables and comparing them is quite buggy. So, it doesn't compare scene.name, it compares the integer in col 1 to the number of the current scene (which is the row in the Scene-table).

If anyone has suggestions for improvement, I'm still interested

• JB

tatiang

@JB makin' a game said:
setting text attributes from tables and comparing them is quite buggy.

I'm curious what you mean by this. For me, tables are one of the most consistent, reliable aspects of GameSalad. That being said, there are things that can be tricky such as referencing data in a cell while it's being changed by a different actor.

JB makin' a game

What I meant to say, is that I find text-attributes quite buggy in general. Getting them from tables is indeed one of the things that works as expected. It's been a while since I was struggling with text-attributes, because I use them far less now.

A few months ago, though, when I set (in the editor, not runtime) different self.text-values in unlocked instances of the same actor and set (runtime) text-values from a table in a self.text-attribute in the same actor, the string expression: self.textAttr1 is self.textAttr2 didn't always work, but sometimes it did (without changing anything).
When I changed both the table column and self-attributes to integer/index and checked in a numeric expression: self.intAttr1 = self.indexAttr2, it worked like a charm for ever and ever, using the exact same logic as the text attributes.

I read a lot of forum stuff, so I'm a little anxious with text in the expression editor. I'm definitely someone who could open the exp. editor, leave it blank and fill it in later, from outside the exp. editor and is then left wondering for hours why it doesn't process the text-input. So to spare myself that misery, I thought putting text into text-attributes is a far safer way to go, no quotation marks or previously opened editors, etc. But yeah, I do find text-attributes a little buggy, in comparison to other types of attributes and in comparison to entering text directly into the expression editor/without using the exp. editor. Oh yeah, and only when used in a string-expression.

For me, this isn't a huge problem, btw. I mainly need text-values to be displayed and that has always worked. Comparing an instance' value to table values can be done just as easily with numbers, if not easier. I just add another note to explain which numbers are what (and even that is pretty straightforward in my game), because the text-values were self-explanatory.

• JB

tatiang

Interesting. I haven't had any problems like that. I'm guessing you're dealing with spaces and possibly special characters. Well, next time it happens, post an example and we'll figure out what's causing it.

JB makin' a game

I will!
It may also be caused by a lack of programming knowledge when it comes to the words "contains", "ends with", etc. My English is good enough to know the literal meaning of any vocabulary GameSalad uses and it seems pretty straightforward using it by its literal meaning, but I can't find any explanation of the programming consequences when using these terms on the site. Probably because it's just as obvious as I think, but for an amateur that's a dangerous assumption to make.

My experience on this forum is very good when it comes to asking questions, so it'll be alright