In this five-part screencast tutorial series, I'll show you how to build a sci-fi themed platformer game, step by step, using the free GameSalad Creator tool. You don't need to have any previous programming experience or game development knowledge, I'll provide all the artwork, and you can follow along whether you're on Windows or OS X. Let's get started!

Play the Game

Use the arrow keys to move and the space bar to jump. Find the key and reach the exit in all three levels to complete the game!

Download GameSalad Creator

GameSalad Creator is a tool for creating games without needing to write any code. The free version allows you to develop games for the web (as seen above) and for Mac—and even for the iPhone App Store, if you have an iOS Developer account.

There's also a paid version, which lets you export your games for Android, add iAds and in-app purchases, tweet players' scores to Twitter, and more. For this tutorial, all you need is the free version.

Download the free version here. It only requires an email address and confirmation that you are over 13, and is available for Mac OS X Lion (and above), Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Note for Windows Users

Although GameSalad for Windows is, for the most part, the same as GameSalad for OS X, there are a few issues. There is a detailed post on the GameSalad forums listing these problems, with tips explaining how to get around them.

You may also like to check out my side-by-side comparison video of the two versions.

Watch the Videos

Overview





The source zip file contains:

A file with the suffix Complete , which contains the full finished game

, which contains the full finished game A file with the suffix Empty , which only contains the source graphics and sounds

, which only contains the source graphics and sounds A file with the suffix Shell , which contains only the level geometry for the three levels of the game and the actors needed to build the geometry

Getting Started





Next Time...

In the next post, we'll lay out the geometry for the first level.