Ok let's go!
- Open up GameSalad, click the + New button, then click My Great Project, and just to make things a little more organized fill out all the project information.
- Change the Title to
"Ball Drop"or whatever you would like to call it, like "Super fun awesome bouncy game", and just to be safe let's uncheck Enable Resolution Independence. If you decide to publish your game to the App Store, then it will look great on all devices whether retina display or normal.Tip
Tech tip
Graphics that you import should be two times (2x) the size that they appear in the scene, and with dimensions divisible by 4. The reason that most systems (even many modern graphics cards) demand power of two textures is mipmapping.
In mipmapping, smaller versions of an image are created in order to make the image look proper at a very small size. The resolution is divided by 2 repeatedly to make new images.
So, imagine a 256x128 image. This would have smaller versions created of dimensions 128x64, 64x32, 32x16, 16x8, 8x4, 4x2, 2x1, and 1x1.
If this image was 256x192, it would work fine until you got down to a size of 4x3. The next smaller image would be 2x1.5, which is obviously not a valid size. Some graphics hardware can deal with this, but many types cannot.
- Now we are going to create the MAIN MENU! Rename your first level to
Main Menu, open it up, and import the sprites you created. In case if you have forgotten how to do that, click on Images in the Library and click the + button to import them, simple as that! - Arrange your actors around to create your main menu; I arranged them around to look like part of a level.
- Create another actor and name it
Text; this will be used to display text, such as the menu title, buttons and any copyright information you would like to include. - You should end up with something like the following screenshot:
- Don't forget that when creating text actors, to set the alpha to
0. To do this, double-click the actor in the Attributes, open up the Color drop-down list, and change the Alpha value to0. We aren't going to populate the actors with behaviors in this chapter, so let's continue.
In this section, we created a level that will be our main menu. You created a nice-looking background, some labels for the title and copyright info, and some buttons that we will be programming later on in this book.
Create your own main menu. For this project, we are going to make a level selector, and leaderboards section for iOS; but if you're just making this game for fun, no need to do either of these. Try to make it look as snazzy as you can, this will be more appealing to people (of course).