GameSalad

http://www.gendaigames.com/products/gamesalad/

Has anyone used it yet? They certainly sound very confident - and being able to deploy directly to the iPhone could be huge.

I would love to make games for the iPhone, but I don't have a Mac

It all is Apple stuff.

Wow, it's surprising just how many up-and-coming game creator kits are around these days.

The thing about iPhone is although it is popular, it still has a relatively small market share of the overall mobiles market. You won't be able to reach that wide an audience. Still, while iPhone users may not be many, they sure are a vocal part of the community.

They released an alpha now - I guess you devs should take a look at it, just to see what they're doing and maybe it'll give some inspiration. Maybe they solved a few problems in a smarter way or whatever.

In any case, I think the games they ship with it as examples are [nerd mode on] boner-shrinkers[nerd-mode off], especially compared to how nice their site looks. But we'll see, since their target market are iPhone apps, it could still be an interesting app.

Ashley: Not sure that's true. The iPhone market may not be the biggest mobile market out there (yet), but there are a lot of geeks, tech-fans and so on that actually buy games, which makes it a very viable market. Here's an interesting article:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/s ... phone.html

His demo was downloaded 2.4 mio times, the full version was sold 320k times so far.

40k a day, 600k a month - That means that small teams could actually make a living by kicking out high quality games. And the iPhone is an interesting piece of hardware, so I'm pretty sure you could create some amazing stuff on it.

I don't think those figures accuretly convay how good that game is, it's just there arent that many games to choose from or compete with yet. Every one will be rushing to make iphone games now and the market will become saturated. These people making big money simply got there first, and in my opinion that ship is already sailing.

I'd like an iphone but they're too expensive just yet, and besides if you pulled one of those out here in the uk you'd probably get mugged and stabbed 10 seconds later.

The iPhone is certainly a highly lucrative market. People will keep buying apps and games from the app store because it's easy, impulsive and people get bored.

The market will probably get a little swamped, but there's still huge potential to make money there.

I don't think those figures accuretly convay how good that game is, it's just there arent that many games to choose from or compete with yet. Every one will be rushing to make iphone games now and the market will become saturated. These people making big money simply got there first, and in my opinion that ship is already sailing.

It doesn't, but it shows that there's a market for small development teams to push out great games and actually getting them out to people without having to come up with a ton of financial backing first - which is awesome. So, I don't see where this ship should sail. I don't think it's a good idea to quickly create crappy games just to make a quick buck, but I do love what Apple has done for indie developers.

I think what we'll see in the future now is that all those crappy iPhone games that aren't even worth 2 dollars will quickly fade away, because there will be a ton of great games that actually are well produced and are a lot of fun and they'll be created by teams of 3-5 people instead of 15-30 people, which actually marks a paradigm change when it comes to game development.

Personally, I hate how we split the market right now, with casual (read: shitty, "basic" games that you could also play through flash in your webbrowser) and hardcore (read: "play it safe" productions, sequels, big budgets, etc.) games - We can now do simpler stuff in shorter timeframes and focus on core gameplay issues that weren't fixed in the hardcore department yet cause it would've been too risky to experiment. We can experiment more with story and gameplay and even release small games as prototypes to bigger productions, just to see how people would like this or that direction. And all of that is pretty exciting.