Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men... I had intended to write about cross-platform graphics technology or something of the sort. But then E3 happened, and Game Studio was shown by TouchArcade, and suddenly people started taking notice, and hitting us up for more information. So, let's talk Game Studio.
First, a reminder glimpse of the TouchArcade video:
Game Studio started with a complaint. I could do absolutely everything I do in my every day life on my iPad, EXCEPT for my job. The one thing I do more than anything else, is the only thing I couldn't do. And why not? Well we make software for a living...FOR iPads even...so clearly there was a way to make this work...
It started with our internal engine, a custom project, and a bunch of (very shoddily thrown together) UI. Originally all it did was provide me a text view where I could edit LUA scripts (our internal engine has a pretty strong LUA backend), save them out, and watch the results. From there I realized I couldn't actually do a ton here yet, so I threw together a very ugly and barely usable image editor. And with those 2 features I got my first glimpse of what Game Studio has been born from. I was able to sit down with just the iPad and actually make up a small game (anyone who saw it at GDC saw it in this state... a simple space shooter where meteors flew around and blew up).
And then crazy amounts of "real work" cropped up and it was left in that state for quite a while, until just recently when I got the urge to pick it up again, and really make it something that lives up to the promise of anyone with just an iPad being able to sit down and actually create something with it.
The new plan:
- Out with the LUA, in with the Visual Editor
- The simple view of the "screen" is replaced with a proper scene view
- A new proper scene editor is in progress
- An updated non-sucky (not-by-me) image/sprite editor
- A new audio recording/editing tab
And that will be the new Game Studio, coming to an iPad near you.
Over the next few posts we'll follow the progress of these updates, take a better look, and then actually make a small game, using nothing but some simple art, and an iPad.