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Although I cannot speak for Gamesalad in particular, don't underestimate the ability of tools to be able to create some great games, even in the absence of raw
by anant 16y ago
Although I cannot speak for Gamesalad in particular, don't underestimate the ability of tools to be able to create some great games, even in the absence of raw programming power.
At Blizzard, rumor has it that the programming team calls it a day long before any game is released (sometimes a year in advance) because their map editors are so powerful that the game designers don't really need anything else.
There are 3rd party "maps" out there for games like Warcraft or Starcraft that implement an entirely different genre of games. I fondly remember playing a racing game inside Warcraft 3.
Rules are expressed in a manner similar to what I've seen of Gamesalad -- they can indeed be quite powerful.
- Ogre 16y agoSpeaking as a Blizzard programmer, I can tell you there is no basis to that rumor. Edit: just to be clear, I'm not discounting the rest of your points. It is indeed possible to do very sophisticated things with triggers, rules, or what have you, you just tend, in my experience, to wind up with something significantly harder to read and maintain than something written more traditionally. Which is probably why Blizzard's RTS's include actual scripting languages as well. "Probably" as in I am a Blizzard programmer, but I'm not on the RTS team and haven't worked on any of those games directly other than a tiny bit of Battle.net code for SC2. It's possible, even likely, you know more about SC2/WC3 modding than I do :)
- MrJagil 16y agoBlizzard feels like the Apple of the gaming world- slowly, but consistently dishing out great products which you can trust to be fun and exciting. And yes, the editors are very powerful. Look no further than "DotA" which has spawned no less than THREE spinoff games: League of Legends, Heroes of Newearth and now the main developer(IceFrog) of DotA has gone on to develop DotA 2 for Valve.
- dazzawazza 16y agoI haven't worked with a single game designer that hasn't within a few hours needed something 'more' from what ever you give them. It's the nature if the beast that designers want more from AI/Scripting coders who in turn want more from the engine coders who in turn want more from the hardware manufacturers and 3rd party libs they use who in turn want more from the electrical engineers who in turn want more from the silicon researchers who in turn want more from the physicists who usually ignore you. That's the games industry :)