Rathores blog

It's common knowledge that I'm not a programmer, and probably never will be. It simply takes too long to build something I want from that basic a level, and I'm an extremely impatient sort of person. So with all the hype about mobile game development going on right now, how would us non-coders grab a piece of the fun, short of hiring someone to do our dirty work for us? Here are a few ways:

GameSalad



GameSalad is a drag-and-drop game creation tool for non programmers to make full-featured games on iDevices with absolutely no code at all. It boasts an impressive track record with a substantial number of games made using it already in the iTunes app store. Impressive documentation is available on their website and it also has an active community helping newbies along the way. On top of that, games made using GameSalad are HTML5 based, which means they can also be web-published if you do not want them to be mobile apps.

This toolkit is no-brainer recommendation at the top of my list, but it is not without its cons: The toolkit brands itself on your loading screen each time anyone starts your game, and the only way to remove it is to pay 499 USD per annum for their professional version. Another issue is that it is Mac OSX 10.6 only, and exports only to the iPhone, which sucks for those of us who prefer Windows or Linux platforms for development, or want to make apps for Android.

App Inventor


Google's very own offering for us non-techies comes in the form of the App Inventor. This web-based app creation tool is all kinds of cute due to the fact that "coding" comes in the form of fitting together puzzles pieces - and we all know, if two puzzle piece don't fit, they don't belong together. This helps non-coders through the notion of arguments and functions, and how all the parts of logical code fits together and are structured. While this isn't essentially a game creation toolkit, that hasn't stopped people, including an 11 year old boy, from making games using it.

Bad side of it, quite evidently, is that it only makes games for Android (naturally). The second drawback is one I mentioned before, the App Inventor is a general app making toolkit, so it's not essentially structured for games - which means platformers, shooters and the like will actually be harder to make in this environment. However, if you are making an essentially UI based game, like Druglord, you are good to go with App Inventor.

Adobe Air


We have been praying to the Tech Gods for this to happen, and it recently did - you can now make native mobile apps that work in Android and iOS using Flash. How? By using Adobe Air, of course. Adobe Air is, in their own words, a tool to "build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser". Putting this on the list might be a little misleading, because games on Flash requires some coding, but Actionscript, the coding language of Flash, is a language that many designers are familiar with, and is one that was created with non-coders in mind. There are easily billions of tutorials available online in its instruction and learning it should not be much more than a hiccup.

Of course, like anything with Adobe, it's obscenely expensive. Of course, you can develop apps using the open-source Flex framework or Javascript, but really, the only real non-coder way to use Adobe Air is through the visual interface of Abobe Flash, and buying that will set you back a few hundred bucks at the very least. The second flaw is one I mentioned before - it's not quite code-free, since you'll have to delve into basic Actionscript to make stuff interactive, but like I said, it's not that hard.