Is GS worth it?
serenitytec
Member Posts: 1
Hello all. I'm new here and am at the decision point of whether I should use GS for game development (planning a 2D platformer). My primary question is whether it is worth the $299/year subscription to develop mobile games using GS? Is it normal for publishers to get a return on this investment?
Comments
@serenitytec Welcome. Past polls in these forums indicate most people here are interested in creating and selling games. The rest either enjoy creating templates, designing for fun, or teaching introductory development courses. I really don't know if most are earning the $300 spent back again. I'm guessing many are not, at least in the first year, but it's just a guess.
I personally use GS for prototyping. The tool is excellent at quickly building out 2D levels and interfaces that can give clients or myself a better idea when planning out an app.
There are dozens of 2D development tools but GS is one of the most flexible out there. If you're new to coding and are looking for a mix of visual drag & drop with a bit of expression writing this is likely a good fit for you.
Right now is a weird time to begin using GS as it is evolving into a strictly online web based platform. The desktop creator versions (which the majority of us here use) haven't seen love in a while and will eventually be left behind. It's for this reason that I now do my actual development in other tools.
GS is:
+Great for Learning
+Rapid Prototyping
+Friendly Community
-Eternal Bugs
-Lacking Support
-Old solid tool (Desktop Creator) is dying, New fledgling tool (Online) isn't yet viable.
@RowdyPants can you let us know what other tools you use to say, within around the same budget per year? I do wish to enhance my use of tools beyond GS. Unity is too much for the moment for us.
As for the question @serenitytec, I 100% agree with what @RowdyPants wrote.
I think GS is great for prototyping. And I have yet to find another tool which is as simple and easy as GS. Seeing that it is still developing (but sadly seems quite slow) gave me some hope that it will be great again. But at this moment, I would say it is out of love and support that I paid the $300 and continue to for the moment being. And it still is a great flexible 2D developer platform.
As for the developers for GS, I wish that you guys keep it up, and open more options for the fans like us to give inputs, and how we can help. Then perhaps GS can be live again.
Cheers!
Louis
I would say it's definitely worth it as long as the support continues and bugs continue to be squashed.
My answer would have been different a couple of years ago as support was virtually zero!
GameSalad is incredibly easy to learn and you can make apps very, very quickly. It is possible to earn your money back if you steer clear of what everyone else is doing and make something truly unique and different. My advice would be spend a third of your time making something cool and two thirds of your time marketing the hell out of it.
It's been a great introduction to programming for me and I am currently learning Unreal Engine. But Unreal is sometimes very complex to do simple things and I keep finding myself returning to GameSalad to knock up ideas quickly and easily.
@NKBDL Unity is free to use if your funding doesn't exceed $100K per year. If you have looked at Unity and it's not for you a similar but open source tool is Godot.
As far as the original question if the current version(s) of Gamesalad fits your needs then it's totally worth the money. It's an easy to use tool that you can use to quickly prototype games/apps and certainly use to build final projects with as well. However if you wish there was some missing feature that you hope will be added soon, you can be pretty sure it won't be. So in that case it probably wouldn't be worth the money for you.
http://jamie-cross.net/posts/ ✮ Udemy: Introduction to Mobile Games Development ✮ Learn Mobile Game Development in One Day Using Gamesalad ✮ My Patreon Page
gs is a great place to start making apps and much less difficult to learn than combined swift and java, and an easier on build option if you are looking to publish for ios and google apps.
if you are looking to code, then it's also a great way to learn logic.
as for making money after your purchase, that will depend on how well people take to your apps. you could have candy crush levels of success if you go viral, and $300pa will seem like nothing.
hope that helps.