I just signed up for GameSalad PRO for Mac tonight and am already tearing my hair out with frustration.
I was expecting a game development environment and bought a "toy" instead!
Considering I just signed up and paid $29 USD (per month I might add!) for the privilege of what is essentially a very-much featureless application, I'm pretty annoyed and just feel cheated.
The capabilities of this application make it "half baked" in my opinion and really don't have the feature-set one would expect from a fully fledged game design platform.
Yes, there may be a lot of functions and its supposed to be designed to be "code less" though c'mon, is it really that hard to chop up a tile set into pre-defined pieces and add snap-to features.
Even the cross-platform type arrangement doesn't make up for it as you need to be able to efficiently design the game first to ever be able to publish it. Seems like the developers thought of the end-goal and forgot about the purpose of the application, with that being to "design" the game or application.
There is no snap-to grid where tiles can be lined up and there is no way to load full tile sets to enable ease of drag 'n' drop of tile areas when designing.
There is also no view settings to add layers manually (there is a Send to Front, send to back, etc. though this is hardly what I'd call organised and doesn't allow you to switch things on and off so you can build layers within the game).
I did read that four years ago someone made a comment about "we're working on adding in loading of tile sets" and that was it, four years later, nothing.
It has literally taken me half an hour tonight to line up about 10 different 16x16 tile squares on a iPhone 5 screen. Snap-to, I could have finished the whole screen by now.
If I can make one candid suggestion, how about being able to load a tile set, allows the designer to choose the size of their tiles (e.g. 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, etc) and have a mouse-drag over the loaded tile set that lets you select multiples of that size tile from where the mouse click is held down until release (e.g. you've now selected 16 lots of the 16x16 tiles from 2 tiles in and 4 tiles down so you can select a whole tree, instead of having to piece together 20 pieces of a tree manually from a tile set that needed to be cut up into little pieces to allow for import).
I can't even find a way to zoom in and out on the screen when in design mode so my 16x16 tiles look minuscule and are virtually impossible to line up.
Honestly I've seen tile map applications written by programming students in Java that have a better feature-set than that provided by GameSalad and that's saying something.
Not very impressed and rather more frustrated as hell from the experience.
Cancelling my subscription already, which lasted the grand sum of one day.
What a waste of money!
Christian
