Game Develop as a WebApp : give us your feedback!

GDevelop general
21

That’s exactly my point of view. :slight_smile:
And that’s why I was a bit surprise when you also first asked me “Why you don’t implement all the missing features and improve the existing ones instead of port the whole thing to the web […]”, because I thought you hinted me to keep implementing new features without trying to do something unique.
I think we all agree that’s important for GD to have lots of nice features, but adding new one won’t make it become more popular. It will just be more powerful (It’s a good thing, but could be better).

True, it’s not battle tested yet because it is not popular enough. (That’s a bit a vicious circle we’re dealing with :slight_smile: It’s not popular so not battle tested, so no more popular so no battle tested so… )
But making a successful complete and famous game is a challenge which requires at least as much time as I spend currently on GD. While I can spend time writing tutorials, creating examples and demos games, making a complete game is a lot of work and doing it by mysef means stopping GD development for let’s say a month. (And it’s not guaranted I can make a successful game: lot’s of luck required and the ability to produce nice graphics and imagine a nice gameplay.)
But again you’re absolutely right: GD needs more successful games made with it to be recognized and well known. And I hope that’s somebody will be able to reach this goal. :slight_smile:

Nice! :smiley:

Woule be nice also! :slight_smile:

That’s also my point of view. I agree that GD lacks of tutorials (I can’t help myself but adding features instead of writing new tutorials) and that more shoud be added.

Apart of 3D, do you have other ideas that could make GD unique? (I’m not saying 3D is a bad idea :slight_smile: Let’s just try to enumerate all the features that could make GD stand out).

22

Well, I was revisited the idea of GD as webapp with clear head and I can see some opportunity that would be interesting such as, a webapp could make it possible for multiple people to work on the same project from distance.
So, if I make a project on the web, I could let others, anybody or specified members to access my project and make changes or simply make a copy of my project to their library. This way we could share and access examples easily on the web and we can also organise team work from distance.
We could also share events, complete solutions to do certain things, similar to behaviours in Torque2D that others can import in to their project by one click. A “behaviour” can be for example as simple as if I press a key, a specified object start to move right.
We could share the complete events as a “behaviour” to make this and others can import it, select the key to test and specified object to move maybe even the direction and that’s it.
People don’t have to understand even how to use events, they can simply use behaviours made and shared by others but at the same time behaviours can be also an easy way to show and learn how to use events and expressions to make a specific thing.
We could also share game assets on the web to import them in to our project.
A webapp also could make it possible to test our games on target device without need to export and upload anywhere.
So the focus of a webapp is not necessarily to develop games on Android and iOS, but we can login and run a preview from Android, iOS and any other possible target device to see if it works as it should and once we are already there, we can make changes to fix any problem
which can be practical. We don’t have to sit in front of our PC we don’t even have to be at home to fix something and we don’t have to export our game and upload to anywhere only to test it on target device. Also, because GD using events it easy to use even on tablets and mobiles because we don’t have to type many things, mainly we select events and objects from lists. So after all, why don’t develop a game on iOS and Android or any device with a browser?

So if you can say “Yes” for all my thoughts, I can see potential here and I support the idea. Go for it. Give as GD as a webapp. :wink:

The only problem with a webapp is that, practically we have to upload the assets to the web to be able to access the project from anywhere which require high speed broadband and big online storage. But this project in long term, basically the future of development where probably high speed internet access and big online storage will be less hassle :smiley:
If it cause trouble to anyone, they can still use the desktop version or can use shared assets on the web. By the way, can be useful if shared assets, projects and behaviours can be accessed from desktop version too but in that case, we can’t simply add them, import them to our project but we have to download them to use.

23

Perhaps some extension that would make making procedural games (like Terraria, Starbound) really easy? So the only thing you’d need to do is to make graphics and sounds and don’t worry about coding (maybe except some simple formulas that would affect generation) unless you want to? procedural games are really popular now, so that would give GD advantage over other engines.

The only other thing that makes such things possible is Worlds, but it’s a game and more of DIY Minecraft.

24

How about a sprite builder in GD? I’m not talking about a sprite editor, this would be a builder.
I mentioned before we could share game assets on the web, how about asset parts, sprite parts that we could put together inside GD to make an unique sprite and also we could save it as an animation frame to make easily sprite animations for GD this way.
Imagine that, we have heads, bodies, legs, arms, weapons, hats, wheels…etc shared on the web, and we can simply import them into GD sprite builder and use them to build an unique sprite and also sprite animation. We rotate a hand a little bit and save it as animation frame 1, rotate a little bit more, and save it as animation frame 2 and so on. This would be GD’s own built in sprite builder and animator.
I think it would be a very nice, unique feature, the only problem, need to find royalty free graphics to start with until the community would start to share custom staff. On steam just released a very nice modular graphics library just what we need:
store.steampowered.com/app/281900/

I wonder if can be an option to share them in GD webapp system for non commercial use.
I mean what is the different between I make a game and use these graphics within the game and store them unencrypted or I make an app that would include these assets to use only within the app and store them encrypted (sprite builder could use it own custom format) :unamused:
Technically, not a big different. Maybe would worth to contact the devs about this, probably they don’t let you to use their graphics library this way, but what you loose? An advantage would be, it could motivate GD users to buy their library to use it for commercial use within GD.

25

Something like Spriter? Anyway, I think this would be cool addition. I think Victor or some other extension dev made Bone animation extension (not updated anymore), that let you animated bones of character, then all you needed was to set sprite pos and rotation to specific bone - quite good solution actually.

26

Yes something similar to Spriter, but actually we not necessarily need bone animation, only the actual images, frames of built sprites.
I think a built in “sprite builder” would be a lot easier to implement, and also to use with GD, because you can simply import all the parts directly in to GD, and place everything the way you want and 4ian don’t have to work on compatibility with an external tool or extension. The built in sprite builder can be specifically designed to work with objects in GD. Even can be integrated in to object editor. Basically I can imagine sprite builder as a basic image editor, where you can import multiple images, place them, rotate them, scale them and save the result in one single image/frame of an object directly in GD :slight_smile:
And maybe later can be improved to be able to paint, draw and change color is well to make sprites even more unique.

27

I know of at least two dedicated softwares for that kind of animation:

Both are complex pieces of software, and even as external tool, it would be too much of an assle to add them into GD. Let alone buid them from scratch within GD.
It’s easier to use them as we use gimp or audacity: as standalone external softwares.

28

Hi my name Ek kian, i’m new here… but i’ve been following GameDevelop since long time ago when i search alternative to replace Gamemaker and Construct 2.
I develop games at http://www.gamesura.com and also teach game development class for multimedia students at local collage so i search easy to use game development tools because many students can’t do programming because their major is design so they have little or none programming skill at all.

In my opinion GameDevelop have huge potential to be able to compete with Gamemaker or Construct 2, even with Unity!, but many things should be improved before it happens :slight_smile:

This is many things that imo should be improved or fixed:

  • Game Develop is your app name, why not using domain with that name? last time i check domain game-develop.org is available.
    Game-develop.org is easier to remember, will improve your app name/brand awareness and also good for SEO to have great impression on people that search “easy game development tools” at Google :smiley:

  • If I not wrong, Game Develop built using SFML, please upgrade SFML to newest SFML because newest version support to build native iOS and Android app so Game Develop can produce iOS native app and Android native app.
    Check this link: http://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=13716.0
    If you following thread at Construct 2 forum, there are many-many requests to support native build but denied by Construct developer that believe that HTML5 is great cross platform solutions just we only need to be patience to wait until HTML5 support on mobile became stable… because for now HTML5 stiil not so stable on mobile platform, still many problems (there are also many threads about this complaint HTML5 performance and problems at Construct forum), limitations and hurdles such as Javascript garbage collections, memory management (dynamic load/release assets), audio functions, etc.

  • I know that Game Develop also can produce HTML5 games, i already testing it but compare to Construct 2 HTML5 engine it still lack behind, so please for HTML5 game backend use Phaser HTML5 game framework that already proved to be very fast, have complete features, easy to use, big user base and actively developed, so this will easier to support rather than develop HTML5 engine by yourself and your time and energy can go to more concentrate to develop best Visual RAD for gamedev tools.

  • If you want Game Develop to compete with Unity then you must use Urho3D as backend because Urho3D support many platform with great features: urho3d.github.io/
    because lately in Unity forum, many visual programming plugins got popular such as Playmaker by Hutong Games and UScript but imo that tools still much more complicated rather than Game Develop or Construct event sheets programming that is so easy to use, so many people still waiting 3D gamedev tools that using event sheets programming because for now Gamemaker, Construct 2, Gamesalad, all only support 2d games, none for 3d games, so Game Develop? :slight_smile:

  • Please support block for custom scripting using easy to use language (maybe BASIC or LUA) this will also attract many programmers that enjoy programming but want to use easy level builder and assets management of Game Develop because many Gamemaker users still prefer GMS rather than Construct because GMS support GML script, so they still can typing code rather than using block logic.

  • And last point please use common terms such as Objects, Scripts, Plugins etc (maybe check terms that used by Flash, Gamemaker, Construct or Gamesalad), please don’t use terms such as Automatism, etc that hard to remember and hard to spell.

That’s it, i hope the BEST for Game Develop! :slight_smile:

29

I agree with Gamesura that for one developer your strategy could be better. Instead of reinventing the wheel, just use one of the available more feature full and mature open source html5 game libraries for compiling and just write the UI backend side of it.

This would then justify the effort to focus on rewriting the GUI completely from scratch, because we will at least get new features in the process and get on a track that will likely get us faster addition to new features and bug fixes.

This will also possibly get you developer help (if your gui backed was open source) and also users who know about that library and respect it.

Your html5 library may be open source, but it is not as popular and battle tested as some of the other available ones. :slight_smile:

30

Game Develop already use Pixi.js for rendering HTML5 game (equivalent of SFML for native games).

31

so is Phaser a better framework then?

32

You’re not fair with me, I already use open source powerful and mature libraries for almost everything that I can in the software. So this is exactly the contrary: my strategy on this point couldn’t be better, contrary to all other game creation tools that use proprietary rendering engines. :slight_smile:

Both “framework” are equivalent in terms of success (Roughly the same numbers of fork in github), pixi.js is a bit more flexible because there is even a backend for Phaser rendering the graphics with pixi.js (“It uses Pixi.js internally for fast 2D Canvas and WebGL rendering.”).
Both are rock solid so there is no need to spend time for changing. Pixi.js is awesome and is the best choice to do HTML5 games, period. :slight_smile:

33

I do not like web apps, because even when you buy them you do not really own their license. You RENT it , until their servers one day close doors.
It’s a service, not a product+support one could purchase like construct2/mmf25.

Being a service brings a lot more responsibility on your head- because you are also housing content that other businesses will rely on. That way they can sue you for losses if something goes wrong on your end. Your forced update breaks their project. Your servers being down causes them loses. You can come up with all sorts of trouble.

That is why I do not like buying video games or other types of software with that sort of licensing scheme.

That is why it looks to me like a bad marketing move to do so for gamedevelop. :smiley:
It’s your decision to do so. I am just explaining why I dont use other software that has moved like that to the cloud.

I am not fair with you- yes maybe so. But that is partly due to lacking information, which I eventually get from replies.
When you make an announcement like this- it is important to fill in everyone with the details with a FAQ. Being clear with people about your plans is extremely important for gaining their trust.

Since you are not doing that, people start filling in the empty blanks with their imagination. And thus you find out exactly what they think when they hear the word “webApp”.

They hear “oh, better move to construct2 then. Those guys at least let me own the tool- on my hard drive… oh and yes- their updates actually bring features i need”.

Google docs is one thing- google being a huge company that has earned public trust by consistently giving to the world free products and services, supporting open source software- actually pouring a lot of money into it as well as developer resources. They have based their entire business on trust. Which they absolutely get from both developers and users.
developers.google.com/open-source/soc/?csw=1
Google docs is also for smaller projects. Writing a doc or making a presentation is much smaller than making a game.

Valve being another company like that. They offer free goodies and manage to build a free model that absolutely has developers and users trust and at the same time make them money through micro transactions and a small % of profits. Everyone wins there.

A lot of Devs dont trust webApps yet. You are closing the doors to contribution even more by moving to the cloud too (plugins, etc) .
You wanna have trust? Make people actually feel like they own the tools they are using for their project. The community feels like it’s their tool not some company’s.

34

This is true, but remember that the same apply for all proprietary softwares: if they developer stop working on it, the software won’t get any new update and you’ll be forced to move to another one. The only exception is if they release it as open source: remember that if one day I stop working on GD, I’ll release it as open source (Including the desktop version and any work done on the webapp).
What is nice is that GD already use only open source technologies. Every single libraries used to make GD is open source.

Surely, I will consider doing so next time I announce a big feature or a project :slight_smile:

What I am trying to do is thinking outside of the box and innovate. I do not want to “play a catch up game” with competitors. And that’s why I was a bit surprised when everybody was hinting me to “all the missing features”: it’s something that will never end, it won’t make GD more popular, and I’ll only be cloning the features offered in other game creation tool. Not cool for me, not cool for GD, not cool for you.

GD is the tool that you own the more when compared to C2 or MMF2.5. Of course GD is not entirely open source, but the platform used to create the HTML5 games is entirely open source and all official extensions are open source.
It’s something that does not exists in MMF, C2, Stencyl or Game Maker. If the teams stop working on it, it’ll be very bad. If I stop working on GD (but that’s not my plan yet :smiley: ), it will be open sourced, and in fact most components are already open source.

Another point: I am not abandoning the desktop version of GD (god damn :laughing: ). I’m just creating a prototype entirely based on the already existing (and even partially open source) codebase of Game Develop. If it’s a success, it will be profitable for everyone because I’ll get a lot more users interested in the product, developers that will contribute to the open source extensions, maybe I could even release the core of GD entirely as open source.
If it’s not a success, I’ll have lost a bit of time, but surely the development of the webapp will have help me to identify new things that we’ll be ported to the desktop app, such as new sharing features.

I share your point of view on these companies and I like the way they are doing things, particularly Valve. :slight_smile:
Please just do not consider me as a “Bad guy” just because I’m trying to develop a webapp… I’m trying to push limits of HTML5 and innovate by creating a web app based on the core of Game Develop, with new features that couldn’t have been done easily in a “old fashioned” desktop application. :slight_smile:

35

sorry i dont consider you a bad guy. What I meant to say is webapps make users feel like they are using a website and not actually using a tool they have on their computer.

Websites go away. They become dead links one day or another. A physical copy of an installer stays for as long as the operating system can run it.
If development stops on a proprietary project- it becomes abandonware. It vanishes.

If development stops on an open source project- there is a chance somebody else would pick it up for their own needs and improve it. The license will then force them to share these improvements with the community. It might become abandoned only if its badly documented and there is already another open source project that is better. Right now there is no other open source project like gamedevelop. But imo its a matter of time until there is one. :slight_smile:

Enigma is quite successful in terms of copying game maker. It shows that if an engine is popular enough, the community will clone its design and reimplement it with an open license.
enigma-dev.org/
Same with construct2. Some day somebody will get the bright idea of doing exactly what enigma community did. They will reimplement construct2 and even make the plugin system compatible- giving them access to many features that have already been developed by c2’s community.

Right there and then you will have yourself a competitor on the open source scene as well. And from there on its a game of attracting contributes.

You seem to be set on the idea of open sourcing it when you no longer want to work on it. Why is that? If you open sourced it, you would need to continue to work on it- in fact be in charge - be a code maintainer deciding on what patches go in trunk. Without a code maintainer an open source project can become outdated and abandoned too.

36

Hm… I’m starting to understand your point, 4ian. Out of curiosity: Are sources of Sprite extension available for modification? I think I will be able to make texture blitting which would let you use spritesheets directly (without using importer). If I’d do it right, it should work for all spritesheets, even those where single frame is bigger/smaller than others or if weird spacing is used (like in Icy Tower character sprite sheets).

37

Hey 4ian,

First of all I understand why moving to a web based app is a tempting option. You don’t have to code and test for different platform for each release which would give you more time to fix bugs and add new features. :slight_smile:

But my past experiences with Web apps have not always been that great. I use Goolge Docs almost exclusively, I don’t even have a word processor installed on my computer which on one hand is nice but in the event of internet failures I feel helpless.

I’ve tried using Pixlr which is slow and tedious compared a native graphic editor. An excellent app that I like to use is webchemy but again a simple chrome crash can spoil hours of work and if i’m not connected i can’t load the app. Also, and this may be exclusively for me but working on a browser is a distracting affair. I often find my self wandering to different sites.

And though each page runs as a different process i have faced global unresponsiveness issues due to some page error.

That aside I think that you should pursue a web app if you feel like it. As a community member I would love to see it flourish but I also think that improving the native version is a better option.

I downloaded construct 2 and Game develop at the same time. But as pointed out lack of tutorials, written and video are a major set back. In the past months I’ve managed to learn and have created 2 games in my free time using construct but trying to do the same in Game develop is more challenging.

I agree GD needs unique features but as I remember it did have them. Remember GD had lighting way back before whereas Construct only added it in this release. Also native support desktop.

I think GD should move with adding and improving the native version before venturing of to a Web based app.

though this is not the place or time but here are some things I think that can really boost up GD reputation

Features

–You must have heard of the game dev community’s demand for Ubisoft to release the UbiArt engine, why not implement feature like that into GD.

–Simple track animation combined with event based system would really attract a lot of developers. The ability to create cutscene will automatically boost the engines appeal and help create more polished games.

–Also, I’m sure people would jump on the opportunity to use an engine that support Vector Graphics. That hasn’t been done yet.

–Features like internal support for skeletal animation would be welcoming as suggested by others.

–Adding native export for android is also bound to make people consider game develop, and will also help it surpass Construct’s current feature set. (adding support via wrappers are not always successful.)

–I think GD have one of better UI’s then some of its competitors and it can be further simplified like the event sheet and naming.

I know it’s more easier said than done but having them in your agenda and promoting the upcoming features will make us look forward to new releases.

Tutorial

–It would be a great start for beginners if you have a small video series with a even 2-3 episode, one explaining the UI and another, hour long, on how to create simple game clones like that of Mario (complete with design, score, enemy AI, sound and export) and/or a simpler, faster Flappy bird.

Investing a week on a project like this will definitely ease up new users.

Marketing

–Being more active on Twitter and Facebook like other competitors will help a lot and though it might be not possible for one man to do all of it, you can ask a friend to be your Social Media Manager (people like designations). :smiley:

–Constantly indulging users to request new features, choose between new projects and also to report bugs and UX hurdles.

–Stressing on “Free Engine” and “Multi-Platform”.

Also I want to add that I was really happy for the Crowd funding initiative and though I couldn’t contribute I tried my best to spread the work on Twitter, FB, and Reddit’s gamedev community (where they politely told me I cannot promote a crowd funding if i’m not associated with the company/project, but they did say they would be glad if you did it yourself.)

Sorry for the lengthy post and going beyond the scope of the topic but i think if these issues are addressed properly first it would create a good platform for a future web based venture.

Also find a simple two syllable name that should be priority one (even if you go forward with a Web App idea).

38

why not make the GUI in html5, but keep it an offline piece of software - just like it is at the moment.
If there are any online features- make them optional. User upgrade optionally. Users upload to the cloud optionally. Cloud stuff is optional - so any disadvantages and limitations are of course optional as well.

Dont force people to use the cloud and they might give it a chance more. :slight_smile:

39

This is a good idea in that case if 4ian want to implement online features in to desktop version, but for now the webapp version is going to be a completely independent version of GD and new “experience”, except the project file may going to be compatible. I think there is nothing to worry about, as 4ian mentioned, the desktop version is not going to be abandoned and the webapp version is more like an experiment and attempt to innovate, try something new, something different. The only case we have to worry about the future of GD is that if the webapp version is not going to be successful. As 4ian hinted, GD really need success to keep him interested to work on GD and we can’t blame him because of that he is trying to make GD successful as a proprietary software (or web service).

Even if 4ian going to make GD open-source one day, there is no guarantee it going to be picked up by someone and going to be actively developed, our best option if GD is going to be successful and keep interested 4ian to work on it and 4ian’s best option if he can make GD unique by trying new things. Adding features of other tools is an endless race and leads nowhere really and we can’t even expect that GD going to have up to date features forever for free. At some point, GD need to have potential to make money to keep it actively developed. If the tool don’t have potential to make money, even open-source may not be able to help as potential to make money = popularity. If something is not popular why would anybody work on it? As 4ian loosing interest, everybody would. Even open-source projects need popularity. GD is free, can be used by anyone for any purposes, if it can’t make it popular, I doubt it open-source would make anything different. Also new, custom features can be added to GD through developing extensions which maybe not well documented but I don’t even see many questions, interest about it in the relevant topic viewforum.php?f=28

40

going open source means picking up a new strategy for it’s success.
Simply going open source is not enough to get it picked up. I think that it is important to do a number of other things in order to keep it healthy in that strategy:

  1. 4ian or somebody who knows GD really really well needs to be a code maintainer- to review forks, keep a plan for the future of its development and organize other developers.

  2. A friendly GIT repository needs to be setup in order to make GD easy to pick up and fork by other developers

  3. Good code documentation- again to make it more friendly to pick up by other devs

  4. Accessible for compiling and easy to maintain code. A good example of this is the transition of pencil animation software to the pencil2d fork. The original was almost impossible to compile on a modern linux distro/other os. The code got hard to debug and maintain. So in pencil2d (the fork)- the first thing the new developers did was clean up the code, update the libraries, remove some libraries and make it easier to compile.

  5. Popularity in the open source community. This means 4ian or someone else will need to keep in touch with the graphicslibre and other open source organizations. Will need to get the word across and invite developers. Good devs are not just going to find gamedevelop’s git/svn repository on their own.

Without these points and some more i cant think of right now, GD as an open source project wont have much of a change in terms of success.

If however they are met, and a few developers pick it up- well then, we are going to see things happen I think :laughing:

Being open source means that other devs can fix bugs they discover. Not just 4ian. A lot of the bugs are in the GUI too you know