Founder of GameSalad Discusses Making iPhone Game Development Mainstream

Michael, founder of Gendai Games, talks about getting non-programmers to make games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/cc-game-salad-final.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]W9cHfhx9z9M[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Casual Connect in Seattle, and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Michael: I’m Michael Agustin from Gendai Games. I’m the CEO.

Interviewer: What product are you guys working on?

Michael: We’re working on a platform called GameSalad which has a tool set that allows non-programmers to make games for the iPhone and iPad.

Interviewer: So, there are a lot of these. When you say non-programmers, that’s what distinguishes it from Unity and some of these other tools that are out there that kind of allow you to make an accelerated development process for iPhone and some of the other platforms.

Michael: Yeah. So, every other approach before comes from more of a computer scientist trying to make scripting easier for other folks. In fact, the problem is that most scripting solutions are still for people who are fairly technical, almost have computer science degrees. So, we have a different approach.

Our goal is to start with something purely visual and with the metaphors that visual thinkers are used to using being able to build games the way that they understand it. They use Photoshop or Illustrator, and as they learn more and more about inner activity, sort of move them towards that. So, we’re kind of starting at the very opposite end of the scale, as it were.

Interviewer: What were some of the design challenges as you were developing this and iterating? What were some of the surprises that you saw as people were actually trying to use this system to develop applications?

Michael: So, a lot of it is building the user experience. Being a programmer, it’s sort of easy to say, OK, I’ve made things easier by adding scripting language or there’s less syntax involved. But, when you’re dealing with folks that don’t think like you, it involves a lot of testing and making sure that you don’t overwhelm them with features.

Our approach was fairly different. It was to start with a very small feature set that allowed people to build very powerful experiences and then build from there. So, as GameSalad progresses more into the program, we’re going to be adding features that would enable them to make experiences on the level of very experienced programmers in a very short amount of time.

Interviewer: Can you talk about this program, when it’s going to be deployed and some of the features that are coming out, or is that still under wraps?

Michael: A lot of it is just growing with our community. We spent a lot of time making sure that GameSalad is very easy to pick up and it’s important for us and has let for us for people to build a variety of games in the platform. Over 70,000 people downloaded the software. We’ve had almost 1500 games, and we’ve had over 800 games get published at the App Store. So, that’s roughly more than one percent of all iPhone and iPad games.

Interviewer: What’s the pricing structure? If any game developer wants to get started and just check out your stuff, how can they get started?

Michael: So, our original goal is to provide a prototyping solution that was free of paper and would replace paper prototyping because paper isn’t interactive as electronic media. And so, the base version is free. You can upload to GameSalad.com.

Interviewer: This would also be a good tool for paper prototyping then, you’re also saying or is that?

Michael: Well, it’s meant to replace certain aspects of prototyping. So, paper can produce a larger edge of experiences, but for the purposes of creating electronic games, I think we could have solutions that are a bit better.

If they’re looking to make money using GameSalad, we have an express solution for $99 a year and a pro solution that’s more for studios. It can [?] games for $2,000 a year.

Interviewer: OK. Great. And what’s the website that people can go to to find out more information?

Michael: GameSalad.com.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.