As we enter 2026 we're working to roll out an effort we're calling internally GameSalad 3.0. Instead of laying out a roadmap, I'm just going to share the first few big efforts work working to launch by the end of January:

GameSalad Viewer 2.0

We're working on a new viewer app (it's almost done, I just need to track down one annoying bug). With a new core app based on React Native, we'll be able to iterate faster on new features and keep things up-to-date. Look forward to things like:

• Load games from your Publishing Library
• Adjustable scaling (stretch, contain, fill) and rotation settings (landscape , portrait, auto).
• Shows ads on ad behaviors.
• Dialogs prompting how to handle IAP requests (i.e. test allowing and rejecting a purchase).

GameSalad macOS and Windows

I know we keep saying it's coming, but really this time! We're working on a beta of a new macOS and Windows native target!

Rendering Improvements

As we mentioned earlier, we have have a version of the engine waiting in the wings with automated texture atlasing and nearest neighbor rendering (sharper pixel art scaling). And if some of our investigations work out, we'll have a few more improvements in the wings. With the new Viewer build, this will also accelerate testing as we can quickly test a variety of games with these new engine features.

We have more in the wings and we're excited to share once things become more concrete! Happy New Year and I look forward to see what you all build in 2026!

Instead of just saying "go grab the tool and do it yourself, or ask around the forums", we'd like to have a list of developers available.

Want your name added to the list?

https://forms.gle/yknN4RZnWcWCiKDd8

Some projects we'll just pass along directly, some will be managed by GameSalad.

We won't pass on your rate info if it's just a referral, to give you the opportunity to negotiate the best rate. Though if they give us a budget in their request, we may filter referrals so your time isn't wasted.

Heck, we may even put some of this in a listing website on gamesalad.com (don't worry, we'll ask what details you're willing to share first).

Looking forward to working with some of you in the future!

TL;DR: We got the basics, we need to verify it and make it cheaper to run. But what we get is already pretty cool.

===

Propmpt: Make a cookie clicker game. I just need the main actor, the counter actor, and an actor that displays and fades as a result of the amount the click adds to the score.

Result:

⏺ High-Level Cookie Clicker Implementation

 Core Behaviors Needed:

 Cookie Actor (Main Interactive Element):

 - Touch/Click Detection - Rule with mouse/touch conditions to detect clicks

 - Visual Feedback - Scale animation or color change on click

 - Score Management - ChangeAttribute to increment counter

 - Audio Feedback - PlaySound for satisfying click response

 Counter Actor (Score Display):

 - Text Display - DisplayText showing current score

 - Dynamic Updates - Rule to update display when score changes

 - Number Formatting - Expression to format large numbers

 Popup Actor (Click Feedback):

 - Spawn on Click - Created by cookie when clicked

 - Value Display - Shows points gained from click

 - Fade Animation - Interpolate alpha from 1 to 0

 - Upward Movement - MoveTo behavior for floating effect

 - Auto Destroy - Timer to remove after animation

 Key Parameters:

 - Base click value: +1 point per click

 - Popup duration: 1.5 seconds

 - Popup movement: Float up 50 pixels

 - Counter update: Real-time score tracking

 - Audio: Short, satisfying click sound

 ---

 Cookie Clicker - Pseudocode Implementation

 Cookie Actor:

   Attributes:

     position: (400, 300)

     size: (128, 128)

     image: "cookie"

     clickValue: 1 (custom integer)

     originalSize: 128 (custom real)

   Rule "Click Detection" (ANY condition):

     Condition(event: touch_pressed)

     Condition(event: mouse_down, over_actor: true)

     →

       ChangeAttribute(target: game.score, value: game.score + self.clickValue)

       PlaySound(sound: "click", volume: 0.8)

       Spawn(prototype: "clickPopup", x: 0, y: 20,

          direction: random(-30, 30))

       // Scale animation for feedback

       ChangeSize(width: originalSize * 1.1, height: originalSize * 1.1)

       Timer(interval: 0.1, runOnce: true):

         ChangeSize(width: originalSize, height: originalSize)

 Counter Actor:

   Attributes:

     position: (400, 100)

     size: (200, 50)

     image: ""

     scoreText: "0" (custom text)

   Rule "Update Score Display" (always active):

     →

       ChangeAttribute(target: self.scoreText,

              value: "Score: " + precision(game.score, 0))

   DisplayText(text: self.scoreText, font: "Arial", size: 24,

         color: (1,1,1,1), alignment: center)

 ClickPopup Actor:

   Attributes:

     position: (0, 0) // Set by spawner

     size: (60, 30)

     image: ""

     popupText: "+1" (custom text)

     alpha: 1.0 (custom real)

   Rule "Setup Popup Text" (runOnce: true):

     →

       ChangeAttribute(target: self.popupText,

              value: "+" + precision(game.cookieClickValue, 0))

   DisplayText(text: self.popupText, font: "Arial", size: 18,

         color: (1,1,0,1), alignment: center)

   MoveTo(position: (self.position.x, self.position.y + 50),

       speed: 30, runToCompletion: true)

   Interpolate(target: self.color.alpha, finalValue: 0,

         duration: 1.5, easing: ease_out, runToCompletion: true)

   Timer(interval: 1.5, runOnce: true):

     Destroy()

This implementation provides a complete cookie clicker with satisfying visual and audio feedback, real-time

 score updates, and animated popup effects that communicate the value gained from each click.

===

This is in Claude 4 Opus, so it would be expensive for us to share this now. Next is to try these inputs on cheaper versions of Claude an other LLMs as well as figuring out how to bake in the fine-tuning so we don't eat up the context window.

But I just added two things I've been meaning to add for ages to the engine:

• Automated Texture Packing - Packing smaller images into a single texture atlas during runtime.
  • Don't have to worry about power of 2 image memory bloat for smaller images.
  • More efficient as we aren't transferring or swapping out lots of images
  • Makes it easier to support sprite sheets and sprite maps in the future!
• Nearest Neighbor Filtering
  • Pixel art can stay pixel art without you manually scaling it! So you can use smaller images!

These were deep engine changes so I've been hesitant to take them on, but finally got around to getting them in. If you have a game with either lots of small images or have some pixel art you want to send to me to test out, DM me!

https://github.com/gamesalad/gs-electron-forge

I threw this together a few weeks ago on a weekend, but wasn't able to get it tested in a Windows environment until now.

I'm not 100% sure how to use this to generate a full installable package yet, but it does startup a window / mac EXE when you run the right commands.

Enjoy!

We also had a request to adjust frame rate, but that's not really necessary in behavior because.... you can do it on your own!

This assumes that you have a common image name root and a 2 digit number after the name. So something like

'walk01' 'walk02' 'walk03', etc.

For this example we've also set up two Actor Attributes, FPS and FrameCount.

Then all you need is a constrain attribute as follows:

self.image = "walk"..padInt(ceil(mod(devices.clock.millisecond/1000*self.FPS,self.FrameCount)),2)

Hope that's handy for anyone looking to do something like this!

• New text functions
• Updated ad networks
• Upgrade our version of freetype2 (emojiis)

The new text functions will include:

• textReverse
• textToUpper
• textToLower
• textUrlEncode
• textTrim

The toUpper and toLower functions came about because we know some of you are using the "lua" versions of those functions, which will break on JS. Reverse is to help support people rendering in right-to-left languages and textTrim was just an easy addition. UrlEncode will be handy for those of you creating URLs for use with the network behaviors. These will be available in Creator 2 first and should work if you manually type them into Creator 1.25, but it will take us a bit longer to update the two Creator 1.25 to make these available.

The freetype2 upgrade is not a guarantee (at least not in the short term). I was about to start it, but figured I should get the first two updates out first before taking on the risk of the next updating a core library. The latest freetype2 might have enough api changes that it will take longer than expected so it might be broken into two parts, upgrade and then emojis.

Just to give you all an update on the things we've been working on:

• Moving to a new payment system that will handle taxes for us and allow more payment types internationally
• Improving the UX of Creator 2
• Rearranging the codebase to allow for faster builds
• Researching implementing AI into the platform.

We figured we needed to take a break from these behind the scenes things, since none of them are ready yet, and get some engine updates out to you!

If any of you have ideas for new expression functions that would be handy (think math or text functions), let us know and we'll see what we can do!

Back to the code mines so you don't have to (though i guess new expression functions is really empowering you all to code a bit more...)

I just now realized that we never shared it more widely, so here you go!

https://gamesalad.com/store/

Maybe if there's any demand, I'll look into digging up our classic designs we've made throughout the years.

Presenting the GameSalad Ugly Sweater generator!

https://gamesalad.com/articles/2024/12/23/happy-holidays-from-gamesalad/

Create by our own @uptimistik and art from our old game Battle Legend Infinity to bring you some holiday joy!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanza, Happy Festivus or however you celebrate this end of year season, may it be awesome!

Love, Joy, and Creative Vibes,

The GameSalad Team!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQyLKQJrrdDDPAMGWFlmvEpEI4CCpDuoMhRsnAan97LMtF4IGoLzLEMvuhxZV36UytukfoBosnX7OTH/pub

I'm publishing it as a google doc for now, as it's a work-in-progress. If anyone want to see more example, or if you have suggestions to make things more clear, please let us know and we'll update the doc!

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!

Tauri is an HTML5 wrapper that uses the OS's native web component, making the binary a lot smaller.

Sooo... here you go:

https://github.com/gamesalad/gs-tauri/

Try our groundhog day app!

https://arcade.gamesalad.com/games/176072

The app combines GameSalad, glitch.me, and groundhog-day.com/api

This is a polished version of an app we've developed a new tutorial for. The tutorial teaches how to integrate GameSalad with an online service at a high level.

Even though we created this for our Edu product, I thought it would be valuable to every developer, so we put it on youtube!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkULNLXbIennG7V54Im6O3qZ4sa1QxTDT

Want to see the code behind the server side app?

https://glitch.com/edit/#!/gs-groundhog-api?path=main.py%3A1%3A0

Ping me if you have any questions!

GameSalad has been working with @uptimistik to build Type-R a typing game to be used in GameSalad for Education.

We're releasing as sneak peak "holiday" edition!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Kwanza, Festive Festivus, however you celebrate, we wish you a joyous end of the year!

Privacy Policy Update

We’ve updated our Privacy Policy. It now provides more info about what data we collect from you, how it's collected, what we use it for, and what rights you have over your personal information. If you have any questions or requests in regards to your data, please direct them to privacy@gamesalad.com

GDPR in Regards to your Published Apps

GDPR effects everyone who has apps or games published to any of the app stores for a couple reasons:

1. Our engine has tracking in it, which means that all of your currently published apps on the store are not currently GDPR compliant.
2. Ad providers have their own tracking that they perform in order to serve targeted ads to your players, so you will need to account for that in your games.

To address this we're in the process of removing the tracking from our engine (the engine for iOS apps is already updated without tracking, so simply republish your apps to the stores and you should be all set for iOS, unless you serve ads).


Republish your iOS apps to the store and, if you serve ads, read the information below first.


Our engine is still being updated for Android (and the API level is being updated to 26 as well), so stay tuned on when to republish Android apps.

If you use advertisements in your games

If you don't use advertisements you can ignore this part.

If you do serve ads in your games, you'll need to create a new game attribute called 'privateDataConsentForAds', and set it to '-1'.

You will need to inform your players that the game/app they're about to use serves targeted ads, and prompt them to give their consent before playing. If they consent to being shown targeted ads, set privateDataConsentForAds to '1' and all the ads should work normally.

If they don't, set privateDataConsentForAds to '0'. This will cause no ads to display for most ad providers. The only exception is AdMob, which will show non-targeted ads.

Make sure to save and load the privateDataConsentForAds attribute so that you only need to prompt the player once! I've attached a super simple project demonstrating how you could set this up.


I hope this helps clear some things up, but feel free to drop questions below!

UPDATE - 2018-06-11

If you see mentions of an "RC" build in this thread, you can ignore those now. The RC build has been promoted to the main build and the RC button has been removed.

Way back when, I used to do monthly updates on what we were up at the salad. The school year is starting all over the US and we're onboarding classrooms full of students ready to build games with GameSalad.

As this happens, we're also working on tweaks to our back-end systems to make up for a lot of old tech debt that's been holding us back. So here's what we've been up to!

Arcade 3

If you haven't noticed we've launched an updated arcade! We've updated the UI a bit and added orientation detection on mobile, so we can warn users to rotate their devices.

https://arcade.gamesalad.com/

As part of this effort, we're going through more recent entries to update our "featured games" on arcade.

Future plans include:

• move away from static arcade embeds to more dynamic ones, so we can add more features
• doing some static game analysis so we can divide the arcade into mobile friendly games and desktop friendly games, so you'll never see a listing for a game you can't play,
• the ability to map and autoload joystick support, letting us show off more games at conferences with our GameSalad Arcade Cabinet.
• find an arcade ad partner so we can integrate ads into games automatically and decide on thresholds where we start sharing revenue with creators (think youtube).
• integrate the new arcade into GameSalad viewer, so the app becomes both a dev and play tool!
• let creators mark their games "remixable", so other users can use an arcade game as a starting place for their own creations

There's a lot of stuff before we can do this stuff, but we just wanted you to know that we do occasionally think about arcade and want to turn it into something special.

DB Move

First off, we're moving some of our databases to new servers that should help us scale better in the future, operate more cost effectively. If you've experienced some outages over the last month or so, we were likely tweaking things in prep for this move. We just finished the move last night and are keeping an eye on things.

Content

For our education market, we're building out some new content targeted at teachers, but I though this audience might find one of the items interesting:

https://gamesalad.com/education/cs-concepts-in-gamesalad/

The coolest idea from this doc that we created while building a few internal games is the concept of a "Command Object" Actor. Let us know in the thread if you want a video or for me to cover it in more detail!

Publishing 2

We're in the process of moving the publishing UI (https://publishing.gamesalad.com/) into Creator 2.

The impetus for the move is to get rid of another legacy server, saving us both time (in the time it takes to add new features) and money (in server cost).

But the biggest reason is to unify the developer experience, making Creator 2 a one stop shop for building and managing your games.

This will also give us a chance to adjust some things to make generating apps more intuitive:

• The ability to upload icons per app
• Service config in the app context and not the game context,
• Support for adaptive icons on android and custom splash screens on FireTV.

Android Ad Network updates

We're also in the process of testing our updates to the Android build, sometime this week or next you should see a new RC for Android with the following updates:

• Target Android 33
• Updated ad networks: IronSrc 7.3.1.1, Admob 22.2.0, Chartboost 9.3.1
• Google Billing Client 6
• Google Consent Management Platform support for GDRP compliance (https://support.google.com/admob/answer/13554116?hl=en)

Shortly after the Android update, we'll be doing the same for iOS

As we wrap up some of these "tech debt" task, it means we'll be able to move faster on features, so we're excited!

Community Spotlight Submission

Hey, we're love to shed some more spotlight on the community, so if you have a new game coming out or if you want GameSalad to share your story and help market you or your studio, DM me!

Keep Creating!

TL;DR: A future HTML5 engine release will respect the randomSeed attribute. If you don't care about that, set randomSeed to -1 and it will behave like before.

----

Some background:

Random functions on computers are not "truly" random and instead are pseudo-random number generators (prng's). A math function returns a new number every time that's close enough to random to be usable. AFAIK, all random number algorithms need what is called a "seed" to kick off the random number sequence.

In the native engine, you can adjust the seed by setting the game level randomSeed attribute. If you didn't care about the seed and wanted different randomness every time, you would just set the randomSeed attribute to something related to device.time or set it to -1 which seeds with default "random" value (which usually includes stuff like the current time, data from some random memory location, etc).

In javascript, we ignored this because javascript's random number API is not seed-able. We hesitated in the past because using a javascript based PRNG is always going to be slower than the one built into Javascript.

As we started building out our blockchain games, we realized that we needed to make it possible to replay a game session that uses random numbers to check for cheating.

So future versions of the GameSalad HTML5 engine will work as follows:

If you set randomSeed to -1, you will be using Javascript's unseedable but fast Math.random function for all random values.

If you set anything else, then you will be using the javascript based PRNG that will generate the same sequence of random numbers for a given seed.

We'll likely deploy it sometime this week, and we'll let everyone know here when we do. But for now, I just wanted to prepare any HTML5 developers of what's about to happen, so they can adjust their games accordingly.

https://releases.gamesalad.com/creator/GameSalad-Creator-1.25.105-beta.dmg

As always, be sure to back up files before working with them in beta software, but we think this should be pretty safe.

We want to make some fixes to iOS app signing and add the "gs:play*" Audio handlers before we finalize 105 as a non-beta release, but I thought it would be worth getting into people's hands for now.

May we present the 12 Days of GameSalad Calendar!

This is a celebration of our community and what we've accomplished this year.

We hope you enjoy the games we've selected and we look forward to doing this again next year!

Thank you all for creating with GameSalad and as we enter the new year, we're looking forward to seeing what else you build!

If you're not familiar, an advent calendar is part of a Christmas tradition to count down the days 'til Christmas. The calendar is usually a special box or mechanism that lets you open a present for each day before Christmas. It's usually chocolate though people now do legos or beers or pretty much anything you can think of.

There are usually 25 slots, so we'd need 15-20 different gifts (GameSalad would do the rest).

This is a great way for the GameSalad community to celebrate together AND to promote your games or services.

Some ideas of what to submit:

• Arcade version of your game (with an ad for your mobile game!)
• Code to unlock items in your game
• Coupon code for your website or game dev related service
• Free assets as an advertisement for your services (character sprite sheets, music track, template)

So submit your items (and you can submit more than one!) I'm doing it as a google form instead of a forum thread so that everyone can enjoy the surprise!

https://forms.gle/URttAVSkCYUr3C4Z6

If we can we want to have at most 3 items from any given GameSalad creator. We'll have two targets. If we can get enough to get 12 items, we'll do a 12 days of Christmas advent calendar. If we can fill all 25 days, then we'll try to get something out by Dec 1

Looking forward to seeing what you guys produce!

Cheers!

Go make it, with GameSalad! Creating 2D games for iOS, Android, and HTML5 is as simple as drag-and-drop!

Use code 'cybermon22' for 50% off one year

https://gamesalad.com/developer

Basically they're an ad exchange style network with a flat monthly fee. Obviously its effectiveness will be based on how many people are in the network, so while we can't guarantee this will be awesome, we believe it has that potential and are sharing because of that belief. (Also it's free to start out!)

This is very similar to what we tried to do with our own in house ad network, GameSalad Network back in the day!

If enough of you show interest, we'll begin work on integrating them shortly after they finalize their SDKs. So hit the Request Beta Access button to sign up and we'll keep you updated!

At some point, I'll invite one of their founders to the community to answer any questions you may have (or ask them here and I'll pass them along)!

---

Adstronomic - User Acquisition for gaming-apps made cheap and effortless

You've spent weeks building an amazing game and no one downloads it?

Unsurprisingly, it is difficult for indies to generate downloads given the saturation of stores and the high cost of paid marketing campaigns.

Adstronomic is an affordable and effortless Google Ads alternative for indie gaming-app developers. With our AI-powered closed in-app ads network that cross-promotes mobile games, Performance tracking dashboard, SDKs & Unity plugin, Adstronomic has everything indies gaming-app makers need.

How Adstronomic helps your app to grow:

1. Integrate the solution in your app for 3 months to display ads from our fast-growing network (Banner, Interstitial, Rewarded) and have your app cross-promoted in the Adstronomic network. It will generate downloads and installs for your game and improve its referencing on stores.
2. Slowly switch to monetization by replacing an Adstronomic ad slot with a monetization solution (Admob, Chartboost, Iron Source).
3. Once you have enough users and data, your mobile game is ready for full monetization.

Our value proposition:

💵 Affordable - Adstronomic will be 100x cheaper than Google Ads. It will remain free until we grow and pricing will be based on monthly subscription.

⏰ Effortless and time-saving - Acquisition runs automatically and no need to be a marketing expert to be successful.

- Simple - Easy-to-integrate and gaming-app friendly solution.

GameSalad x Adstronomic

We are discussing an upcoming collaboration between Adstronomic and GameSalad that will allow you to easily and quickly integrate our user acquisition solution.

This way, you will have all the tools to attract new players effortlessly while staying focused on your game development.

Happy Development and Growth!

The Adstronomic team.

Website: https://www.adstronomic.com

Twitter: @Adstronomic

Now that AAB app bundles are done and we've upgraded our build system to use CocoaPods, hopefully new third-party features will come faster!

What's on our (short term) roadmap?

1) Pollfish - Pollfish (https://www.pollfish.com/) is a rewarded survey system. It will allow you to ask users to complete surveys for rewards (and rewards you $0.30 per completed survey or more). Usually the reward for surveys is in-game currency. I'm still working through the details but I think you can set the "exchange rate" on their dashboard from survey payout to in-game currency. In the game you can show either an "offerwall" or a single "rewarded survey". We'll support both modes and we'll also add a Tweet Sheet hack to let you open Pollfish separately if you want to keep your existing full screen ads.

2) Adstronomic (on hold) - I was hoping to get Adstronomic in at the same time, but that's on hold until we get some updated SDK docs. I think we'll be able to resume work pretty quickly, but if you were waiting on this one, the wait might be a bit longer.

3) Game Analytics (https://gameanalytics.com/) I'm about to start work on Game Analytics support. It will combine inherit reporting (on scene changes, loading, ad shown, etc) as well as custom event reporting via the "Tweet Sheet" behavior.

Since it's faster for me to develop on Android (mostly thanks to the new build system), these features will come out as part of RCs first, then we'll move on to iOS.

Relatively near future:

• Find a way let reward and poll ads notify the game that there is an ad ready. That way your buttons for rewarded ads or polls can be reactive and only show up when there is content available.
• Create a v2 Send Table and Get Table format that uses JSON arrays instead of pipe delimited data, just to make parsing easier.

Further Future (not in priority order):

• Update viewer app (modernized UI, the ability to directly load games from the web creator without publishing, the ability to pull games from your portfolio, dialogs to test game response for different IAP, Achievement, and Leaderboard scenarios).
• Updated Publishing web interfaces integrated into Creator 2
• Load images from URL

• For backwards compatibility it would work via a hacked TweetSheet behavior.
• For referential consistency, it would replace existing image in the game. This would allow your game to keep running with an initial "placeholder" image that gets replaced when the online image is loaded.

• Text Entry system (though depending on the work involved, it might be Creator 2.0 only).
• Something, something, NFTs?

Two notes:

1) Kindle & FireTV targets. These are going away in favor of a single Android target. I was looking at the code for these and they only things these special targets do is error out with an alert if you're not using them on the specified target device. This is because, at one point, Amazon sponsored Kindle & FireTV for the old free tier. Since that deal is no longer a thing, taking away these two special builds saves use a lot of work. In order to support the Amazon store you just need the FireTV remote and gamepad support flag for FireTV and uncheck the Quit on Back Button flag for Kindle. You would also probably want to only enable Amazon compatible ad networks, which we'll document on the publishing page eventually.

2) Analytics: This is not coming with the first AAB release, but with the new build system, analytics will be easier to do. Soooo.... what networks do you want to support? The top candidates are:

Adjust SDK ( requested by @Baguvix )

GameAnalytics ( requested by @blob )

Amplitude ( requested by @boolsis )

Flurry / GA / Amazon ( popular systems )

So point 1 is just a heads up. Point 2 is a request for comment. Let me know how'd you rank them!

https://forms.gle/ZatQCMPnJgQvxLTTA

Some results from last year's survey.

People

30.8% of respondents work in the video game industry professionally.

30.8% also build games on a contract basis for other people (I wonder if it's the same group?)

Games

72.2% use Apple Leaderboards.

61.1% use Google Play Leaderboards.

40% use network behaviors to update game data.

28% use network behaviors for multiplayer games.

16% use network behaviors to track IAPs.

Publishing

88% publish to Apple

80% publish to Google

44% publish to Amazon

20% on itch.io

and 8% claim to sell game floppy disk (I'm pretty sure 100% of them were joking).

Monetization

52% use ads

52% sell their games up-front

44% sell consumables

40% use ad unlocks

While most people didn't make a whole lot, a few made it over the $1000 mark, with some making over $10k during the 3 month period of the last survey.

The two most popular marketing channels were Facebook and Youtube

A little over 40% of respondents spent more than $500 on marketing.

Swallows

73% of respondents submitted an answer to the question: "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

Only 4 people had the "correct" clarification response: "African or European?"

Though one did answer "more than a laden one" which is likely correct.

Though a few posted an answer found here (with one direct post of the link): http://style.org/unladenswallow/

Legends of Learning is a marketplace of web based video games that engages students with gamified learning.

Replace Unity & Construct 2 with GameSalad in the following video:

Now GameSalad games can become Legends of Learning games!  You just need to build your games for our HTML5 engine and use the sample-legendsoflearning.html file as your game’s index file! (Well there's more to it than that, but we'll send you the details once you get accepted into the program).

Now a word from Brian Dallesasse, who oversees new curriculum and content at Legends of Learning:

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My name is Brian, I oversee new curriculum and new content for Legends of Learning and I’ll be your direct contact.

We are looking to hire independent contractors to design, build and deliver an educational game for one of 236 different Learning Objectives (LO's) in our math sprint. Our Learning Objectives come from the USA Math teaching standards, covering grades 3rd-8th (roughly ages 8-14). 

We’ll give you the concepts you need to teach inside your game, and you decide how to make the best game to teach them.

Know how to teach “Adding Fractions” with a side-scroller? Great!

Think you can make an awesome tower defense game to teach “Multiplication by 10”? Go for it!

Games are paid on a revenue share basis, calculated by your game’s playtime relative to total playtime of all games in the sprint or on the platform. To date, we’ve paid out over $4 million to game developers on our platform.

Here's an example of the model:

Guaranteed Payment Periods (First two years of sprint)

• For the first two years on the platform, games are paid on what we call a “Guaranteed Royalty Rate” where only games in the sprint share a pool of dollars allocated directly to this sprint. In this case, across the two years, there are 4 periods with a total payout of $472,000 in each period (~ $1.9 million overall).
• We are currently in the middle of the 2nd period. The 2nd period ends June 30th. Period 3 runs July 1st - Dec. 31st 2020. Period 4 runs Jan. 1st 2021 - June 30th 2021. 
• Ex: Game totals 2,000 minutes in one period. There are 400,000 total gameplay minutes in the period.
• The Guaranteed Royalty Rate would be (0.05%)*$472,000.00 = $2,360. 

Primary Payment Periods

• After the guaranteed royalty rate periods, games move into payment in our primary royalty rate. Here, games are paid quarterly and are paid based on their playtime relative to all other games on the platform, and the dollar pool is Legends of Learning’s net revenue for that quarter. 
• Ex: Game gets played for 1,500 minutes during the quarter. Overall, during the quarter, games are played 1,500,000 minutes. Company’s net revenue is $200,000 during the period. 
• The Primary Royalty Rate would be (0.01%)*$200,000 = $2,000.

You will receive more details, including specific contract details, available topics, and how to submit games once you become an approved developer. 

I’m happy to provide feedback if you have questions or are stuck, but I really just want a great final product and how you get there is up to you.

Looking forward to seeing your creativity for a math game!

Brian

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Game Examples

They have very high standards, so don’t expect to make it in without bringing your ‘A’ game (in terms of gameplay and visuals). Here are some examples:

The Fractions Space Tournament (3.NF.A.1 / Understand Fractions as Part of a Whole)

https://games.legendsoflearning.com/games/WyJnYW1lcyIsODgwXQ==?noSignup=true&url=https://game-cdn.legendsoflearning.com/content-deploy/1286/index.html&languageKey=game/language/1558928083-language.json

Math Garden: Fluently Multiply and Divide (3.OA.C.7 / Fluently Multiply and Divide within 100)

https://games.legendsoflearning.com/games/WyJnYW1lcyIsODgwXQ==?noSignup=true&url=https://game-cdn.legendsoflearning.com/content-deploy/2998/index.html&languageKey=game/language/1567109573-language.json

I encourage you to create a free teacher account on the Legends of Learning platform and explore some of the top-rated games across the math topics! 

Application Flow

For their current sprint, Legend of Learning is soliciting Math games. The application flow is as follows:

• Submit an application and samples to Legends of Learning via this form. You are competing against pro developers and game studios, so submit your best work!
• Once you become an approved developer, you will gain access to the Legends of Learning developer forum. Brian will send further administrative details to get you settled. He will send you a list of available learning objectives to choose from, and you will receive a concept document for the learning objective (LO) awarded to you. It is on a first come, first serve model. 
• If you are approved as a developer for this sprint, you will also get a contract. Get that signed and returned to them ASAP!
• Make games, submit them, get approved, make money!

We've been cooking this up since the beginning of the year

Topic: RThurman will present How to do gesture / handwriting recognition in GS

If you can't join us in person ,join us online

Fixes:

• Fixes Screenshot Capture during preview.
• Fixes text turning / staying black in the Project Level Actor and Scene browser. This mostly affected people in Dark Mode, where the text was hard to read.

We also have a new RC:
https://releases.gamesalad.com/creator/GameSalad-Creator-1.25.99.dmg

The RC has:

• Fixes for upside down icons in Preview.
• Updated freestick to 0.3.2, allowing for MFI controller support on Mac.
• Updated freeimage to remove support for TIFF, EXR, and RAW files, to match iOS.

Next up, for Creator, we'll be working to fix bugs like the preview custom resolutions resetting and the weird rule conditions clearing out on scrolling instances bug.