Gamesalad Essentials: Create awesome cross-platform games in no time, and with no coding

Locate the GameSalad installation file (normally downloaded in your Downloads folder) and open it. Agree to all EULAs (End User Licence Agreements). The installation will now show up. If it doesn't, go to your desktop and locate the GameSalad Creator DMG that was just mounted and simply click-and-drag the GameSalad icon into the Applications shortcut, as shown in the following screenshot:

GameSalad installation for Mac

Once this is done, you will have officially installed GameSalad on your Mac!

Locate the saved installation file and open it. You will be prompted throughout the installation process. Once it's done, all you have to do is open it.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy! Once that's done, let's dive in to GameSalad for a quick overview of the new interface.

Click on this tab and you will see the different levels you have created. You can see in this template project that there are three scenes—two levels and one for a "You Win" screen.

At the bottom of this screen, you have a '+' and a '-' button, which allow you to create (+) and delete (-) scenes. Give it a try. Click on some of the scenes and explore the levels a little bit to see how things work. Again, we will get into more details on this later.

This tab shows you all the actors and objects you have created throughout your project. What are actors? Actors are the visual objects in your game. Actors can be characters you play, enemies, obstacles, platforms, background objects, and so on. Here you can create and delete actors as well as manage them. You can also create tags and arrange the actors accordingly. These are all things we will discuss later. Look at all the potential you have here. Can you picture the awesomeness you are about to create?

When you start editing these actors, you will be greeted with the actor editor, as seen in the following screenshot:

The actor screen

Scroll through some of the behaviors or actions and get an idea of the things you can do. I'm sure you'll see you can get into some pretty powerful rules and behaviors.

From here, you manage all your tables. What are tables? Essentially, they are a great way to store data and information. Think of it as an Excel file that stores all the players' items, scores, and information. GameSalad has the ability to save information into them and load them all on the fly. This project we opened didn't have any tables created, so I added a few just so you can get an idea of what this screen looks like when populated. When you click on a table, you will essentially open an Excel file. You can add rows and columns and populate them accordingly. You can also import and export CSV files, if you prefer to use your own editor. We will get into using tables later in this book.

I did some test populating of a table. These would be items available within your game. As you can see, I created a few items just so you can see how the table editor works.

The Text column is obviously the name of the item. The Integer column is the value of the item, should you choose to sell it in-game. The Boolean column is to detect whether you already own the item in your inventory.

Boolean?! What's this trickery? A Boolean is a complicated way of saying whether something is true or false. Let's check out the table in the following screenshot:

What your tables look like when populated

Do things seem easy to navigate? They sure are. Don't worry if you don't understand some interface elements right now. We are going to get into them in the next few chapters.