In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at how easy it is to add new images and sounds to your GameSalad project.
Mac version of Creator:
First, let’s take a look at an easy way to create an Actor with an image. Open up GameSalad Creator, and open up our project. Next, we’ll select “Actors” from the selection bar at the top. To create a new actor with a specific image, drag the image into this box. That’s all it takes to add your artwork into the project and automatically create an actor with that image!
You can also import images into an image library within your project. This can be useful if you want to assign an image to an actor later on or if you simply want to use an image as background media within your game. To add an image into the image library, we’ll select “Scenes” from the selection bar at the top. Open a scene by double-clicking on it. In the bottom left of the scene editor, we have our library. Select “Images” to view all of the images within our project. You can drag new images to this section to add them to your project. From here, you can drag images into a scene, into animation sequences, or access them via the “change image” behavior in the Actor editor. You can also drag them up to the actor box to create a new actor with that image.
If you prefer, you can also select the + sign in the Images library, navigate to your image, and select “Open” to add to your project. Any JPEG, GIF, PSD, TIFF, PNG, etc image files can be imported to GameSalad.
Essentially, iOS will automatically scale your images to the nearest of a set of pixel ratios:
- 16×16
- 32×32
- 64×64
- 128×128
- 256×256
- 512×512
- 1024×1024
- 2048×2048
For instance, if your image is 50×30 pixels, it will take up the same memory as a 64×64 image. Any images with a size over 2048 pixels will automatically be scaled down to 2048. As a result, if you have an image that is 130×20 pixels, you may wish to scale the one side down by 2 pixels, or it could take as much as 256×256.
Sounds can be added in the same way as images! Select the “Sounds” in the library, and either drag the files in or select the + sign to navigate to your sound files and upload. GameSalad allows the uploading of MP3, WAV, M4A, and OGG sound files.
Sound volume can easily be changed in your game – in the “Play Sound” behavior, set the volume to a created real attribute. Then use “change attribute” to alter that new attribute to any value between 0 and 1.