If you haven't taken a look in a while, take a gander at Creator 2.0

https://creator.gamesalad.com

Now with:

• Themes including Dark Pro mode.
• Onboarding Tour
• Free tutorials built into the tool!
• More responsive table editor
• And many bug fixes!
• List of projects shared with you in current session.

We held back on the release for a few months now as we waited for the school year to end (so as not to freak out Teachers and students with sudden changes). So I'm super pumped that we get to share this with you!

2024 GameSalad Student Creator Challenge Winners

We also just wrapped up announcing all of our Student Game Creation Challenge winners last week on social media, and I figure I'd share them here:

https://gamesalad.com/education/student-challenge/2024-challenge/results/

This year saw some awesome games!

Roadmap for Q3

Our projects queued for the summer include:

• The usual round of ad network updates
• In Creator 2 publishing UI
• HTML5 engine executables publishing options.
• Windows Native executable

GameSalad Webpack Boilerplate

Also for @Armelline a few other devs who are doing more with HTML5, we now have:

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

Which will help you develop, iterate, and package your custom code more quickly! Based on a webpack boilerplate, this will allow you to easily use modern JS programming features and npm packages to develop your game and package all your custom code in a tidy package!

https://gamesalad.com/articles/2025/01/28/chuc-mung-nam-moi/

We did some digging and found that our code for forcing removal of the AD_ID didn't quite work as expected.

We've fixed that but have found that there's still an ad-id issue we might have.

If you include admob, the Ad Identifier package will be installed by default.

If you declare an app child directed, we include the appset package (which lets admob access ad id but only with a given set of apps. Basically allowing cross promotion within your own apps, but not with other apps).

My gut says even this is undesirable with child directed apps, but I'm not going to blanket remove it without testing since I'm not 100% sure it can be removed safely.

We'll update you more next week, but for now if you did not intend to allow AD_ID permissions, please republish your android app.

This build will update all Ad networks and include support for the epochTime feature that is in Android already.

The next release target is Sunday night. This delay sshould allow us to get rid of the SwiftSupport directory issues some users have been having.

Cheers!

----

For the more tech / behind the scenes curious:

• We had started compiling with all of the ad networks setup as dynamic frameworks, which would allow us to remove different ad networks from your package as configured in publishing, slimming down your final app.
• The problem with this is that this triggers a need to include dynamic Swift Support libs as well.
• This would trigger a need for us to generate IPAs instead of app files, which while generally desirable, would delay the release as we are not at all tooled for that in the publishing system.
• Soooo, we're adjusting the build to statically compile ad libraries as they have always been, so that no one has to adjust their workflow.

Looking forward to getting this updated build into everyone's hands!

There is one thing we couldn't figure out that happens intermittently. The games will sometimes freeze when viewed from Creator, but work fine from Recents and QR Code.

If you're trying to stream an app from creator and it freezes, you just need to reload it from the Recent apps and will work fine.

We decided to deploy because getting something that works sometimes is better than something that doesn't.

We also put in a minor update that respects your aspect ratio settings for recent apps.

Thank you all!

We're currently working on a new release to address this issue. The issue will be addressed in an RC release ("Build RC").

We had hoped to get the release out to you on Wed August 23, but ran into some issues. The RC would generate okay, but would crash on device.

As of right now (Aug 24, 2PM CT) the RC release is now in a "usable" state, i.e. we have gotten a release with no ads running on a device. We are currently testing with various ad network configurations.

Current Guidance:

• If you have no ads, a Build RC release should be safe to submit to Google Play.
• If you have ads, try a Build RC release, but be sure to test on your own device first.
  • Admob - Tested - You should be good to go.
  • Chartboost - Tested. Doesn't crash, but no test ads yet. Safe to publish in a pinch, but be ready to update.
  • IronSrc - Tested. Doesn't crash, but no test ads yet. Safe to publish in a pinch, but be ready to update.

We'll keep this post updated as things progress.

Updated 2023-08-25

https://creator.gamesalad.com

In the process, we created some issues with our network config resulting issues in Creator 2 (and some issues on publishing too).

We believe everything has been resolved and we've also mostly completed the switchover to the new DB server for publishing and arcade.

Over the next month or so, you'll be seeming some refreshes in our web UIs (arcade, publishing, etc). Some of this is just a matter of "it's about time" and "we need to modernize to maintain things". Some of it is to set us up to modernize our build system so we can move faster on feature deployment.

In case you're wondering about engine features, don't worry, we'll be alternating between engine and server infrastructure work. I was hoping to do it this week, but this server switchover took a bit longer than expected!

Sorry for any inconvenience and if you have any issues with publishing or arcade, please DM me!

We're basically looking for "casual esports" games. Games that are single player but have a criteria like points or time to finish that can be used as a basis of competition. The winner or winners would win some form of currency from a prize pool. Players can pay an entry-fee for the game which becomes the source of the prize pool.

The game would likely need the following:

• Session based play - Finite time play sessions that can let 2 or more people play the game and their skills be judged against each other.
• Deterministic levels - Basically ensure that two or more players start with the exact same playing experience. The most common version of these games i see is Solitaire. So a deterministic game would have a mechanism to ensure two competitors are playing the same card layout

If you're working on something like that, or you have a game that you can fit into that mold, msg me! In stead of the usual format where we duck down and code for a few months to try to design a perfect interface for all games, we're going to try a more "partnership" approach. You tell us how your game works. We work together with the partner to build a custom integration for your game. Partner gets new games using their platform, you get new functionality, and we get to learn how this all works best so we can generalize it for the rest of the community!

If you have an existing game and you want to brag about it or are not sure it could be modified to fit this mold, feel free to share it in the thread and we can all discuss!

If your game broke into the Top 100 or Top 50 of a category / market, share a link here and let us know what store and what time period!

We'd love to take a few of those and feature them on our Featured Games page as well!

• Fixes for Android In-App Rating.
• Fixes for Preview Overscan / Letterbox on macOS Creator 1.25
• Updated IronSrc, Chartboost, Admob libraries (the usual updates to keep things up-to-date).

For the new stuff:

• Keyboard Input. We've finally settled on a design for text input, and it doesn't require any new attributes in the engine! Basically: in the "Keyboard Prompt" field of the existing "Keyboard Input" behavior you just need to put in "gs:captureKeyboard". That will tell the system to pull up a soft keyboard (or just wait for keyboard input on desktop), and everything you type will be updated in the attribute specified in the "Change Attribute" field. This solution will only work for a single line of text for the time being, but it should be enough to allow users to prompt for things like player names, etc.
• Tweet Sheet "gs:playVideoURL". Tweet sheet function to play videos from an URL. Unfortunately, this requires that the player is online when video playback is requested, but should help for some use cases where you know the player is online and lets us deliver this feature to you without any tool changes in the short term.
• Tweet Sheet "gs:play*" Audio: Tweet sheet functions to play audio and music. This lets you use expressions to change what audio is playing. There's playMusic, playMusicLoop, playSound, playSoundLoop, playSoundComplete

This is all stuff that's locked in for the next RC, so feel free to get a bit excited!

https://twitter.com/LegendOfEros/status/1582404860606939144 

So on to what this is all about?

Legend of Eros is going to be a story based RPG style game "metaverse". The idea is that a joint GameSalad & LoE team will be building a series of RPG style story based mini-games to tell the story of the Legend of Eros:

https://legendoferos.com/

The games can only be played by holders of the Legend of Eros NFTs. There will be 6000 character NFTs created for this project.

Players will play to earn in-game items which will take the form of NFTs and Tokens (also known as P2E). These items and tokens work a lot like In-App Purchase items in a traditional game, but the player has ownership over the asset and can keep, sell, or lend them it as they wish.

For those of you who know about this stuff: Legend of Eros NFTs will be on Arbitrum One and the games will likely run on Arbitrum Nova. Arbitrum is a Ethereum Layer-2 network, which basically means it lets you deal in ETH (ethereum) but with cheaper transaction fees.

So what does this mean for you?

1)  Community Growth. Sometime in 2023 (maybe sooner), we'll be getting an influx of community members. So they'll be looking up to you elders for help and guidance.

2) Opportunity. We haven't worked out all of the mechanics yet, but we're trying to work out how creators will be rewarded for contributing to the community and the expansion of Legend of Eros. We'll also be looking for GameSalad game designers to work with to build games for the Legend of Eros. So DM me with your rates and some sample games if you want to help build this epic world!

We're also trying to think of other ways for community contributors to benefit from contributing games to LoE. Everything from cross-promotion of your mobile games to allowing you to monetize your games directly with LoEs eventual in-game currency.

4) Free NFTs!  We're going to give away some free Legend of Eros NFTs to the GameSalad community, fill out this survey to be considered:

https://forms.gle/AauE1ze3an86S5vSA

This particular pool of NFTs is only available to paying GameSalad customers or long time members of the GameSalad community, just in case someone come this post via twitter or something and decides it's a loophole to get on a whitelist. We'll only allow for address per user.

Finally, I'll put a quick web3 primer for everyone who is new to all this in the next post.

We'll announce more details shortly, but the idea is to allow you to build and retrofit GameSalad games to take advantage of NFTs as avatars and to integrate play-to-earn mechanics. Eventually we'll build programming interfaces for full on blockchain based gaming!

We're starting by building a special arcade with the project and then graduating to a playful 2D metaverse featuring GameSalad games. What I wanted to ask for now was for people who are interested in:

1) Turning their existing GameSalad games into P2E games by adding a simple reward button or modifying their leaderboard and achievements slightly.

2) People who are interested building new games for this project.

3) People who want to join this new community to help guide a new generation of GameSalad developers!

Fill in this google form and we'll be reaching out to you: https://forms.gle/3ggbmUm7h9XHVKbw7

Creator uses jarsigner, which is a tool provided by Java and used in Android 4.2 (API 17) and earlier.

Google has since release a newer tool called apksigner which does some things differently. Up until now, jarsigner was fine, but Google Play & the Amazon App Store will no longer accept apks signed with jarsigner.

Until we update Creator, you will need to sign manually using the command line.

For macOS, if you have Android Studio installed you can do the following:

1. Download the apk with the Download button on publishing.
2. Open Terminal
3. Run the following command (replacing <things in> as needed)

~/Library/Android/sdk/build-tools/28.0.3/zipalign -v 4 <downloaded apk> <downloaded apk>_zipaligned.apk
~/Library/Android/sdk/build-tools/28.0.3/apksigner sign --ks <your keystore file> --in <downloaded apk>_zipaligned.apk --out <whateveryouwantotnameyourapk>.apk

That final APK <whateveryouwantotnameyourapk>.apk is what you upload to Google Play.

Your build tools may not be in build-tools/28.0.3. The number will change depending on when you installed Android Studio and which build tools version you chose to install after.

If you need help finding zipalign and apksigner try:

find ~/Library/Android/sdk -name apksigner

That should show the correct file path (possibly more than one, just use the one with the highest number).

For Window, the commands will be:

C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\build-tools\<build tools version>\zipalign.exe -v 4 <downloaded apk> <downloaded apk>_zipaligned.apk
C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\build-tools\<build tools version>\apksigner.bat sign --ks <your keystore file> --in <downloaded apk>_zipaligned.apk --out <whateveryouwantotnameyourapk>.apk

We will update this thread once we find a better solution to this problem (either updating the tools, building a solution for online signing, or both).

Just as an explanation, our SSL certs expired and I goofed when setting them up. And with how SSL certs works, it turned out to be one of those "it works on my machine" situations, so I didn't see the issues until it was reported to us today. Those issues affected the ability to access things on Friday as well as the ability to publish games from Creator 2.0.

Next was the inability to log in to Creator 1.25 (native creators) this morning. This was from a firewall setting for our app. We enabled a new setting to prevent people from abusing our auth servers, but it ended locking out Creator for mac. We have since tweaked the setting and things are back to normal again.

Thanks for your understanding.

I just finished the first pass testing of RC for Android and we should have something by the end of the week (depending on how quickly our team finishes the publishing process updates required).

Here's a top-of-my head preview of what's coming:

• All ad networks updated to the latest versions supported by IronSrc (plus a few new mediated ones I think)?
• Fix the speed issue on Pixel 4 and other phones that run over 60fps. We're going to lock GameSalad apps to run at a max of 60fps. Since I don't have a Pixel 4 yet, I can't test it, but we'll try to get one and test it before the RC becomes a stable build.
• Added Pollfish as an ad network (rewarded polls)
• Added GameAnalytics support (lot to document there, so that's gonna be fun on our side).
• You can now enable multiple Full Screen Ad and Analytics providers. The multiple Ad providers is intended to allow you to use your normal ad network and Pollfish at the same time. The multiple Analytics provider is just planning for the future. You can set a "default" ad provider for the normal use and manually call up ad providers using the Tweet Sheet behavior.
• Untested code to allow updates of tables on a table Send. Useful for transactional things like login where you can send a table with login info and then get back another table with session info. I put in the code in such a way that if it isn't used, it won't hurt anything. So if we test it and it doesn't work, we'll worry about it in our next release.

Next I'll be checking on the updated publishing process code and ushering that along for the target release.

Looking forward to finally getting this out the door so we can get all these updates into iOS as well!

https://gamesalad.com/2022/04/01/a-new-dimension-of-play/

We're excited to see what YOU can build with this new technology!

https://gamesalad.com/2022/02/14/ai-valentines-day-poetry/

The card generator pulls data from OpenAI's GPT-3 API via a glitch service (to return the proper network tables json format).

I'll write it up in detail someday, but through it, I was able to find a bug in our network table loading behavior in HTML5 and the python example code to generate a table.

I'll put in some rate limiting and a way to share the image shortly, but I though I'd share what's there for now!

If you've got your own Valentine's projects, share below!

Aquatik Studios (https://www.aquatikstudios.com/) is a video game marketing / PR service that offers a range of subscription packages that provide indie game developers services to successfully launch their games. 

What got our attention is that their package prices are both up-front and predictable!

They offer a range of services that cater to various goals and levels of assistance you may need. Everything from creating teaser trailers and circulating press releases; to building groundswell by engaging an active player and influencer community they’ve built up.

So here’s the deal, we’re curious about how well they might work for our community (and for ourselves should we decide to start releasing first-party games again), but we don’t have any games waiting to be released.

Instead, we’re going to pick a community member who has a game that is about to launch or has recently launched. 

We’ll subsidize $125 to put towards one of their monthly packages for up to 3 months (half of their lowest tier as of Jan 2021). Their prices are about to increase, but for this trial we've gotten them to agree to their 2021 pricing.

In return, we’d like you to report back to the community and allow us to share your experience on our blog and social media (assuming it's worth writing about), and to pay us back if you make over $5000 on your game (no publishing contract or anything, we’re just gonna trust you on that last bit).

Submit your game for consideration here by Feb 11: https://forms.gle/x1DLKeQyFbPnNAfE7

It looks like one of the services we depend on for HTML5 and arcade publishing is down: Elastic Transcoder, the system that translates audio for HTML5 games.

We're keeping an eye on the issue, but may make a temporary change to publishing to disable transcoding or try to drop in a replacement.

We'll keep you posted.

We likely won't be finishing it next week because of the Big Sur issue. I just wanted to get a start on it yesterday to get a sense of what we're getting into and how to design it. I'm gonna set my laptop to update to Big Sur tonight (gives me a weekend to wrestle with any bugs that pop up), so I can start tracking down the Big Sur issues in Mac Creator.

In the mean time, I wanted to give you a sneak peak on how things will work and see if there are any comments (also to assure you that we're really gonna do it this time).

• Expansion files will be store the main game project. Basically it's going to be a zip file of your game project with some special things going on, like audio assets not being zip compressed to allow for streaming.
• You will be prompted to upload a second game project file, the loading game.
• Usually, when the game is installed from google play, both files will be downloaded. BUT it's possible to have the APK installed with no expansion file installed (or in the middle of downloading).
• When that happens, the game will run the loading game. This game project can be a loading screen, a mini game, or even the first level of your main game. It's main thing is that it needs to let the user know that the game isn't fully there get and is downloading.

So here's the flow, assuming you don't have the expansion file downloaded.

1. App starts
2. App checks for expansion file.
3. No expansion file, app starts background download the expansion file.
4. App loads the 'loading game'.
5. Once the app finishes downloading, the game will be able to run with the full game.

Step 5 is where things get tricky, so to get things out to the community quickly, here's the sequence of releases:

Version 1: (Late Dec, Early Jan)

• The downloading happens in the background.
• The loading game has no knowledge of progress and just has to be ready for a restart at any time.
• Once full game has downloaded, the engine will dump the loading game and load the main game.
• You will likely just want a splash screen here or a mini game that can end at any time.

Version 2: (Late Jan, Early Feb)

• You will need to add specifically named attributes that we will updated to notify you of changes in the loading game.
• The downloading happens in the background and will update attributes in the loading game to let you know progress (the bytes total and the bytes downloaded will be sent to you).
• You can display them or not. Now you can let users know loading progress.

Version 3: (Early Feb, Late Feb)

• You will also have a publishing time flag that ask if you want the game to automatically restart when download is complete.
• This will give you the option of including a subset of your game. You can now prompt the users to "restart" the game if they hit the end of your loading game content. If they don't hit the end before the game downloads, everything will work fine as they will just load the full game when they next run the game after the download.

Version 4: (After the next Windows Release)

• We'll add a new behavior that lets you manually trigger "reloading" the game once the expansion file has finished download.
• This will let you either manually trigger (through a button) or programmatically trigger (via behavior like on the end of the last scene) a reload of the game.

There is one extra bit of complexity if people want to include gameplay in the loading game. Game attributes are referenced by an internal ID and not by the name you see, so if you want to convey state from your loading game to the full game, you'll need to ensure that all the internal IDs are the same. The best way to do this is to build your full game, then start cutting extra stuff out of your main game until you get under the 100MB APK limit.

We're gonna push hard for Version 1 and then the timings for Version 2-4 will depend on what else is going on in our schedule. We will likely push hard for version 2 as that gets all you need for an "acceptable" experience. Version 3 is icing on the cake, as google's documentation seem to imply that a simple loading screen an okay experience.

The main thing you'll want to consider in timing your launch is your target market and the size of your game. If your game is large and the target market has mostly slow internet connections, you may want to hold off on release until at least Step 2 is available. Basically, you'll want to consider the experience your players will have as they wait for the full game to download after the apk has already installed.

Anyway, that's a big brain dump of how we're thinking expansion files will work. Let me know if anything is unclear, or if you have any suggestions for the flow!

Cheers,

So if you want to help get the word out about GameSalad and you have some free time, please DM me the following by Friday Jan 15.

• Name
• Title
• Text
• Summary
• Pros
• Cons
• Quality (1-5)
• Ease of use (1-5)
• Functionality (1-5)

If you want to save time, we can do the "Summary" from the full "text" of the review (assuming it's that long). No idea how legit this is / is not, so I'd shorten your names to first initial last name or vice versa.

Thanks!

Release Candidates

We're in the middle of QAing two Release Candidates for both Android and iOS.

• Online creator scalability. As our education community has grown, the online creator has need to grow as well. The team has been setting up servers to handle GameSalad's growing online user base. While that doesn't affect most of you now, as we begin the transition to the HTML5 based creator, (hopefully sometime next year), this will improve your eventual experience.
• The iOS candidate updates code for showing Admob Video Reward ads (updating to a non-deprecated API) as well as fixes for the sizing of banner ads by taking advantage of Admob's latest "Adaptive" banner ad size system.
• Android was the long tent poll here. We needed to overhaul how our android build system works. It's not 100% modern yet, but it's part way there and will allow us to more quickly update ad network libraries. (Ad networks have gotten crazy. We now have to include the kotlin runtime!). As part of that, we have updated IronSrc to the latest SDK along with all supported SDKs, which includes Chartboost and Admob updates.

Should testing go well, we should be able to release these next week. If testing goes REALLY well, we're going to skip or shorten the RC time and make them the full releases.

The Future, future, future...

Our team is also working on getting Windows APK signing updated and some longer term updates to the engine that will future proof us (targeting the bgfx library instead of OpenGL, which will allow us to use Metal, Vulkan, and Direct X graphics backends). This work is slow going, but once it's done GameSalad's engine will be in a great position for the future.

In addition, modernizing the build system and getting a better cross platform player (hello Windows & Linux) it will allow us to being the transition to the HTML5 creator while keeping our promise to have NATIVE preview with a downloadable version of the HTML5 creator.

I don't expect to see the fruits of this labor in your hands before next year, but once it's ready, I'm hoping you'll be really happy with the results!

As we've said in the past, HTML5 will only become the One True Creator when we can give you native preview and offline mode. The bgfx and attending build system update work will put us one step closer to that. And when that happen and we only have one tool to support, we can really start putting the gas on new features!

I want to work on the new text entry system, a saner wire format for network behaviors, improved table loading times, and a light weight custom code behavior among other things!

We appreciate the community's patience as we do all this behinds the scenes work and hope to have the new RCs in your hands next week!

It seems that google is requiring support for some other states including: Account Hold, Restore, and Pause for subscriptions by Nov 1. These features would require server integration. The server would need to make calls to Google's API in order to get these new states as they are not returned as part of the IAP info.

We could, in theory, add this to the game, but that would also entail you packaging API credentials in your game, which is something google wants to avoid.

The reason I ask is that we have at least one user that is waiting for me to complete an updated to google's billing (which we're doing as part of the general upgrade of libraries in the next android release). This would, in theory, allow for subscriptions.

If anyone else is doing this, it would be great to gather resources around how people are setting up their servers to handle IAP in general.

For me this leaves a few direct questions I have for the community:

1) Are you a developer that does web / API stuff that can do contract work for other GameSalad developers.

2) What languages are people developing in, so I can focus efforts for sample code in the future (php, javascript, python, etc?)

3) What host are you using to host sever based stuff in general. Virtual Hosts with PHP support. AWS, Google, AirTable? etc...

4) Would you want GameSalad to handle this as part of your subscription. A general server validation framework for IAPs.

Thanks!

We'll be creating a new build that excludes IronSrc code.

If you are publishing a game without ads, using the Build RC button should fix the issues.

If you do want ads, we hope to have an updated build out by tomorrow.