Making the choice… [Game engine conundrum]

When it comes to choosing the right software for the job, it’s always a very tiring process of fiddling with a few levers here and there within the app to see what clicks and how easy it is to work with.  Since this is basically a hobby at this point, I’ve spent many many hours in my spare time over the years tinkering with specific languages for applications such as Unity’s script, Objective-C or something similar. In the end it never pans out, I lose interest and never return to it. I’ve come to the terms I’m a very visual learner, once I see something done I know just how to do it - that or if I can see the end result in front of me as I tinker and tune in real-time, all of a sudden my productivity shoots up. I guess that’s why I love digital sculpting so much.  I'm sure if I picked a language and kept at it I would've reaped the rewards by now, but my right hemisphere kept giving the beat down to its left counterpart, though oddly enough leaving my logical thinking intact. Hmm so there's hope.

Enter visual scripting. They’re currently a few well known apps out there that allow you to visual create and design games. This allows right brain thinkers such as myself the ability to cobble a game together, but the fact remains that there's so much more to creating a game than just programming. Don’t be fooled but thinking you can just drag&drop content onto a stage hit the build button and poof you have a game... well actually you can but therein lies the problem, it won't reach the maximum potential without some know how on game logic or logic in general along with some rudimentary math exercises; Yah remember asking yourself in school "when am I ever going to use this in real life"

karma is one serious b..... but I digress. Below are some of my experiences with these visual aids.

The first thing I noticed about Stencyl was its very tight community, the app itself is very adapt to social networking and bringing everything into one cohesive unit. What I found though is that stencyl is a slightly more advanced visual scripter, which has it's advantages/disadvantages;

Advantages
- Very feature rich and flexible
- Access to the code behind the drag & drop functionality is a boon
- Refined GUI and artist friendly tools
- The Scratch lego block functionality is pretty cool
- Can build on both Mac/PC
- StencylForge is an incredible resource for templates and everything else

DisAdvantages
- Lack of  professionally done tutorials which GameSalad has in spades
- Even with a drag&drop functionality, you're still actually "coding"

This is actually just half the functionality for a slingshot mechanic Really?

- Still appears like computer back speak to me - “Do or do not... there is no try.”
- No iphone/iPod publishing as of yet but will evidently require a ramp up cycle
- Strange memory management issue that brings the app to a crawl unless restarted

When I learnt that visual scripting within the Unity engine was possible I was stoked... I still am. Tools such as PlayMaker, uScript and Antares-Universe brought Unreal Kismet style scripting to Unity. And even though you can essentially create a game without coding, they still felt programmer oriented to me, well with the acception to PlayMaker. At this point it's my intention to create a game fully with GameSalad and move into one of these more advanced suites. It's only then I'll be truly ready to use them to their full potential.

Advantages
- Visual scripting in the most popular engine this side of a million dollars
- Can easily be read for visual peeps such as myself
- Can create a full game even if you can't code
- Well documented
- Implemented well into the Unity engine
- Can be used on both PC/Mac

That's more like it! It's almost like english!

Disadvantages
- Once again lack of tutorials, but the ones there are informative
- Small community, making answers slow or hard to come by

If nothing else, GameSalad has proven to me that with a bit of tenacity and the willingness to overcome its modest learning curve, it's evident an artist such as myself can create something previously thought very difficult in a matter of a couple weeks. From not knowing the software to what I've learnt over the past week from the vast wealth of knowledge available on the internet, GameSalad's slogan "Game creation for everyone" was tested and it prevailed. Currently I'm well underway with my project as I type. Weekly Progress

Advantages
- Seriously, there's not a line of code to see
- Rapid prototyping games is an understatment
- Well documented
- Gross amount of tutorials
- Easy publishing for HTML 5/iOS/MacOS
- Very helpful community (we're all in this together attitude)
- Human legible "code"

I actually understand this, really I do!
- Opportunities abound to flex my math muscles and logic skills

Disadvantages
- Still in beta and is evident with performance and some crippling bugs
- Although the forums are a wealth of information, the forum itself is dreadful to navigate
- Expensive pro version ($499/year)
- Mac only

So in conclusion, when it's all said and done, I went with GameSalad with PlayMaker close behind. Based on my current schedule with limited cycles to this hobby, GameSalad simply is the perfect level of complexity for me. Maybe in months to come, things will evolve.

~t