For this first little look at Game Studio, I'm going to look at the (woefully ugly right-now) Scene View.
The idea here is that this is where you'll lay out your scene, and actually place all of the objects in the world. The hope is you can lay everything down (similar to a Flash canvas I suppose, though I'll admit I'm completely under-qualified to make any statements regarding Flash development).
Let's look at how this is laid out a bit...
First, a fancy little screenshot:
So this is the canvas you work in.
The horribly ugly magenta (also known as, Programmer-Transparent) is the current background. The green square shows the current scene. If you rotate the app landscape, the game goes fullscreen, and only those things inside of that green square are visible. What this does is allow you to place objects you want created, but not necessarily visible just outside of that square. Back to portrait, and you're in editor mode again.
There are currently only 2 items you can add to your scene, Objects and Sprites. Sprites are actual images, potentially animated, and visible in both game view and editor view. Objects are invisible parts of your game that show up as a simple icon in editor view, and are hidden in-game.
Now let's add a VERY simple Sprite to our scene. In this case, an ugly smiley face with a lack of transparency (I'm no artist, I do not claim to be...):
You'll see a small red rectangle outside the smiley face. This is the currently selected object. You'll also find it highlighted in the scene list on the bottom. Speaking of that scene list, let's zoom in a bit:
This is the simple flat-list of all of the Objects and Sprites in the scene. Currently there is no hierarchy here, we're honestly in debates between adding support for grounds and hierarchy, but also wondering if for a 1.0 that's more complexity than most people will need just to play around - the goal isn't to make a AAA title out of the gate, but rather to let people who otherwise don't have a chance to experience the joy of making games to tinker and play.
Selecting an object, either in the scene view or the scene list will show its current details in the Inspector. This is a simple sprite object with only a few details that are specific to all sprites. The name is set because I specifically chose one when adding the sprite to the scene, and the class is (null) because no script was specified. Tapping on any of these items will bring up the option to edit the value. This allows you to easily place objects by number instead of just dragging around, for more precision. Objects can also be modified by script commands typed into the script input text field (see the previous images "execute lua statement..." field). The goal in every place is to make things as easy to put together as possible, and NOT to be as completely flexible or powerful as possible.
In short, an entire simple game can be put together by adding objects to your scene visually, editing small values (or just dragging them around), and attaching simple scripts, which can also be created entirely visually.
So this is a very brief overview of the Scenes in Game Studio. Next time we'll either look at a bit more advanced scene including setting up additional fields on Sprites (such as adding physics and collision) or the Visual Script editor...whichever is in a better state at the time I write this thing!