GameSalad Is Down

Oh, what’s the matter my little salad-head friend? What troubles you, my brightly-colored Mac desktop application? What’s that? The server is down? You’re unable to connect to the GameSalad server? Thousands of GameSalad developers are now unable to publish their games? That is a big problem. I can see why you’re sad. Seriously, this is why cloud computing is a bad idea. A huge community is locked out — without even the forums to fall back on. The GameSalad discussion board is down too. What’s a GameSalad developer to do?

Fortunately, this site is still online. The Photics Chat and the Photics Forums are online. Also, the desktop application will still work for game creation.

If BOT (my big game project) was completed today, I would be furious. Well, maybe not. I would probably be worried and frustrated, but I would see this as an opportunity to make my game even better.

Even with this trouble, GameSalad is still my preferred software for creating iOS and Mac OS games. I know that the servers will come back up eventually. I checked the news and I didn’t read about any disasters in Austin, Texas. The developers are probably sleeping, enjoying their Mother’s Day weekend. What an unfortunate morning for them.

This does make me wonder about “Project Masala” — the code name for a secret GameSalad feature. It’s supposed to be a really special. I’ve theorized that Masala is HTML 5 / web based game editing for GameSalad. The venture capitalists behind GameSalad recently acquired Rocket Pack — which makes Rocket Engine. That’s web based game development. While I think it’s an exciting idea, as the GameSalad Creator could expand beyond the Mac Desktop, outages like this are worrisome.

As I write this, the PlayStation Network is still down. What if a similar disaster hit the GameSalad community? What if there was an issue that took down the servers for weeks? That’s terrible! That’s why I hate cloud computing. So even though I think it would be cool to create games on all sorts of new computers — like moving GameSalad behaviors around with Nintendo’s Wiimote — I don’t like the lack of control.

I think it would be better if GameSalad had an export to Xcode feature. That way, I could further customize my games. Additionally, I’d have greater control of my projects. Even though the Internet has dramatically advanced in the last two decades, it can still go down. I don’t like the idea of being locked out from my game.

Perhaps this is a planned outage. Supposedly, GameSalad 0.9.3 is going to launch this week. Although, if that is the case, a warning would have been nice.