Goji Game and App Editor beta is now available

The Goji Editor has finally entered beta and is now available for download from www.gojieditor.com.

What is the Goji Editor?

One of the more difficult processes involved in developing applications and games is how to create and organise the content. By organising content we refer to managing all of the elements that make up the game or app, such as images, sounds, brushes, physics materials, level layouts, user interface layouts, scripts and so on. The Goji Editor primarily helps you to quickly create and test game levels / app layouts and organise the lifetime of resources as well as test in real-time across different screen resolutions.

Goji’s secondary function is to enable full game and app production using available game and app development systems such as AppEasy / IwGame Engine, Marmalade Quick, Corona, GiderOS, HTML5 etc,.,. Goji aims to be as platform and development system agnostic as possible to ensure that exported data can be used by any development system and on any platform.

What does the Goji Editor look like?

Goji Editor Screenshot

Who is the Goji Editor for?

Goji has been designed primarily for designers and developers that create apps and games for mobile and desktop systems. However, Goji is flexible, supporting a huge canvas area and could be used in any capacity that involves organising and laying out graphical information spatially. Goji is also a great learning tool for students that are interested in learning the process of putting together apps and games in an environment where they can make changes and see the results of those changes very quickly.

What are Goji’s features? 

  • Create and organise game level levels and app layouts into scenes and actors

  • Export to many different game and app engine / programming language formats, including AppEasy / IwGame Engine, Marmalade Quick, JSON, XML (HTML5, Corona and GiderOS coming soon)

  • Export in multi-resolution friendly format, allowing exported data to be used on any sized display

  • Assisted layout editing, including tools to enable easy layout / layout management, bookmarking, edge / vertex snapping, directional cloning and so on

  • Full drag and drop support, drop entire folders of resources onto Goji and Goji automatically sorts them all for you

  • Support for import of SVG, Texture Packer and other formats

  • Support for physics including fixtures, joints and the ability to test physics

  • Definition of gaming logic and play using events and actions lists

  • Support for Lua / Javascript and other language editing, includes syntax highlighting, code folding and search / replace

  • Interactive play mode that launches the game using the built in engine or other engines, also shows coloured debug output

  • Create complete working / runnable projects

  • Support for user properties

Notes:

  • TexturePacker is a tool that is used to combine many images into a single image, usually referred to as a sprite / texture atlas. Packing images into a single image improves rendering performance.

  • SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format is an XML based format that is used to represent two dimensional vector art work. Goji imports the following tags svg (scene), g (layer), image (actor), rect (shape) and path (shape or geometry). SVG is used by packages such as Inkscape and Adobe illustrator

Future features

Features that are currently in development or will be available in the near future include:

  • Export for Corona, GiderOS and HTMl5

  • Complex actions lists

  • Support for animation creation using timelines

  • Deployment to iOS and Android devices

  • Support for audio, video, web views, in-app purchase, ads and many more additional services

How do I download the Goji Editor?

At the moment the Goji Editor is in open beta and is free to use, however the Goji Editor will eventually become a paid product in the future. To download the Goji Editor please register and sign in then click the download menu to be taken to the download area where you can download a beta copy of the Goji Editor.

 

Marmalade Offering FREE licenses


Get Marmalade SDK for FREE

Marmalade the developers of one of the most powerful cross platform mobile and desktop development systems the Marmalade SDK are now offering FREE licenses. Marmalade are committed to ensuring that developers have the tools to deploy to established and emerging platforms first.

What is the Marmalade SDK? The Marmalade SDK is an awesome easy to use cross platform SDK that enables cross platform development for smart phones, tablets and emerging technologies such as smart TV. Marmalade supports unified development and testing across iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, BlackBerry PlayBook / OS 10, Bada, Windows, Mac OS X and soon Tizen.

Marmalade comes in three flavours:

  • Marmalade C++ – Develop and test 2D / 3D apps and games using a mature C++ API that covers everything from 2D / 3D graphics and audio to native UI and unified in-app purchasing
  • Marmalade Quick – Develop and test 2D apps and games using a very easy to use Lua API that covers everything 2D and audio to physics and unified in-app purchasing
  • Web Marmalade = Develop and test HTML based apps and games using a very easy to use JavaScript API

All of the above enable testing right on a Windows or Mac desktop, with easy device deployment.

New Marmalade SDK FAQ

I trawl the Marmalade SDK forums from time to time and I see many questions that come up from time to time. In an attempt to answer those questions and cut down Marmalade forum traffic I have started a Marmalade SDK FAQ that should hopefully help fellow Marmalade developers find answers to commonly asked questions without having to wait for forum responders or search high and low through the SDK documentation / web.

The new FAQ is located at http://www.drmop.com/index.php/marmalade-sdk-faq/

It is also available in a more compact and readable PDF format from http://www.drmop.com/Marmalade_SDK_FAQ.pdf

Marmalade 6.0 is out NOW!

**** IwGame does not compile with Marmalade 6.0. To fix please comment out the following line at the top of IwGameImage.cpp for now. We will release an early update this week to fix it ****

//#include “pngstruct.h”

Ok, its not often I look in my email box and find good news, but today I saw an email from Marmalade announcing Marmalade 6.0. I took a quick look over the changes list and the new features and it looks pretty awesome. I’m a little disappointed that there’s no native web deployment, but there’s plenty of other cool features to be playing with including:

  • Web Marmalade – You can now develop apps with HTML5 / CSS3 and Javascript. Marmalade have used the same standard as Phone Gap to make it compatible (smart move IMO). This is pretty awesome in itself, but to be honest I’m waiting for the full native bridge exposure and documentation. You wont be making any real time smooth arcade style games with 6.0 but its great for apps and none arcade style game development. Either way I’m going to be getting my hands dirty with Javascript (the most lawless language on Earth :))
  • iPad retina support
  • New native UI enhancements including Toolbar, Table, Picket / Listbox , Tab / Tap Group, Activity indicator and Navigation bar
  • New Mac anehancements such as support accelerometer and location in the simulator
  • And a mass of bug fixes, including the notorious Facebook extension which has been upgraded to the latest on  Facebook SDK for iOS. Also native support for JPEG images

To see the full list of changes check out Marmalades web site at https://www.madewithmarmalade.com/marmalade/whats-new