Salad News 2023-11-01

adent42

Greetings GameSalad Community.

We've been slammed with supporting schools as they come online for the school year, but we're also actively working on stuff for devs!

#gamesaladspooktackular

If you follow us on twitter or FB, you would have seen the #gamesaladspooktackular going on over the weekend! Hope you enjoyed seeing some amazing spooky games made by this community!

12 Days of GameSalad 2023

Rather than try to throw it all together again at the last minute, I'm starting early in my quest for the 12 days of GameSalad!

So if you have a game launching soon or a game you want to highlight, please DM me info (learn more here: https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/98951/12-days-of-gamesalad-2023)

This takes a bit of setup since we create a page for each game, so please provide as much of the requested info as possible!

This is a great way to promote your games as this year we might put some ad spend behind our posts.

Android Viewer Update

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally updated the Android Viewer. This was just a compatibility update (with users both saying it wasn't working for them on newer devices and us getting close to being kicked off for not targeting the right API level).

We still need to do the work to put all of the Tweet Sheet overrides into the app, but I believe the playSound ones should work since they're all "in-engine" and not dependent on the platform. We did just the bare minimum of testing and just dropped it out there after loading up a few games.

Once we make the twitter updates, we'll also start on making updates to the iOS Viewer as well.

Publishing 2.0

We haven't made much progress on Publishing 2.0, because we realized that we wanted to make sure it fit into the design scheme we were about to work on for Creator 2 Pro skins.

So, we switched gears and worked on...

Creator 2.0 "Pro" Skin

With the Creator 2 Pro skins, the idea was to make spacing a bit tighter, easier to read, and the color scheme less purple. We have both a Pro and Pro Dark theme.

We've done a majority of the skinning, but we still want to tighten things up a bit more and have a few items that haven't gotten skinned, so expect another week or two of tweaking before this gets to general release:

Original, Pro, Dark

Blockchain and NFTs

After all the hype has passed by we never quite got fully on board with the blockchain in time, but we're still working on our Joint Venture with Eros Engine (the larger umbrella of the Legend of Eros ecosystem).

GameSalad is providing the "front-end" for their games and they will be building the "back-end" of the games (leaderboards, achievements, coins, gameplay). Our first game release is now in Alpha, gameplay built by our very own @uptimistik : https://erosgameengine.com/game/legend-of-eros-enchanted-escape/

The game currently lets you play with avatars from one of 6 different NFT collections, with Eros being the only one that is fully supported with customized avatars during gameplay.

Building this game and our next release has been responsible for helping us figure out some behind the scenes stuff that will be very useful for anyone that wants to build more complex games with the HTML5 engine.

For this game, we used simple compositing via the javascript OfflineCanvas to paste a head and body based on the NFT configuration for the player character walk, death, and flying animation cycles.

In our upcoming game, we're using a javascript skeletal animation library to get even more complex behaviors from our characters (basically walk, death, and attack cycles that are customized based on the player's NFT head, body, and weapon).

Google UMP

The most important thing we'll be working on and hope to have out soon is Google UMP support, which will help you meet EU requirements for ads in games. We hope to have that out early next week.

If there's anything in here you want me to expand on, comment below! I might respond here or I might just create a whole new posts!

Thanks for creating with GameSalad and as always I look forward to seeing what you build!

RedRobo

Thanks for the update. The dark skin looks much better.

Looking forward to the Google UMP implementation as I believe we must implement this by 16th Jan? Also would really appreciate a good tutorial about how to implement it for us non-coders as I find it all a bit confusing tbh!

pinkio75

Great news; I hope to have Google UMP support soon as possible.

And about the new skins for the creator 2.0. it seem a good feature.

Hypnorabbit

Those skins look wonderful - the contrast will be so much better. Look forward to using.

adent42

Google UMP has finally been successfully tested and should be ready to go tonight or tomorrow the latest. Google's UMP system checks your location and will only show the form if needed, implying consent is given otherwise.

I'll detail it more in the full post, but the short version is:

Disable all of your stuff for GDPR flag, this replaces that.

Tweet Sheet With Message: gs:requestConsent when you want to show the consent form.

Show ads.

You can send the requestConsent message every time without worry since the system will only show the form if it's available. Game does not currently pause for the consent form, so show it on a "safe" screen state like a menu.

The Glessnerd

@adent42 Happy New Year! Is there any directory or post that I’ve missed that has all of the Tweet Sheet functions recently added?

adent42

Not a single combined place yet, we'll need to put something together @The Glessnerd

Jeffm2

Have I missed something? I went to publish a project and HTML5 is gone as an option and none of my previously published HTML5 projects can be updated

adent42

@Jeffm2, got back to you in the support channel.

Braydon_SFX

Am I too late to the party to share my excitement about Pro skins? 🤩

Imagine the possibilities! I wonder if one day CSS variables could be updated by anyone to create custom themes. Would be easy to share, too!

Nice job, team!