the iPhone Developer

Well its been quite some months so I played around with GameSalad so I fired it up to see what has changed. One big thing is support for portrait as well as landscape modes now as it used to support landscape only, not much good for a shooting, top down driving game I think. It also supports iPad but what I was keen to check out is the performance. I downloaded a parallax scrolling demo and put it on my device to see how it would run. Once it loads its ok but it takes a long time to load, you do get an activity indicator but I cant help thinking with lots of sprites on the screen performance will still suffer.

I just discovered (and joined) a kind of games builder environment for creating iphone games. Its a great concept and one where you dont actually write but instead create actors (player, enemies, bullets etc) and scenes which contain actors and simply create rules to manage the interaction between everything. Looks promising, and o, its called GameSalad and you can find it here. The cost is $99 which is for the entry level membership where you can build and publish games but they will come with gamesalad branding. Seems a fair price to pay or you can opt for the pro version which is $2000 and no branding.