5 Tools for Non-Coders to Make Mobile Apps

Saturday, 16 July 2011 - SubscribeLoading Comments...

It's common knowledge that I'm not a programmer, and probably never will be. It simply takes too long to build something I want from that basic a level, and I'm an extremely impatient sort of person. So with all the hype about mobile game development going on right now, how would us non-coders grab a piece of the fun, short of hiring someone to do our dirty work for us? Here are a few ways:

GameSalad

GameSalad is a drag-and-drop game creation tool for non programmers to make full-featured games on iDevices with absolutely no code at all. It boasts an impressive track record with a substantial number of games made using it already in the iTunes app store. Impressive documentation is available on their website and it also has an active community helping newbies along the way. On top of that, games made using GameSalad are HTML5 based, which means they can also be web-published if you do not want them to be mobile apps.

This toolkit is no-brainer recommendation at the top of my list, but it is not without its cons: The toolkit brands itself on your loading screen each time anyone starts your game, and the only way to remove it is to pay 499 USD per annum for their professional version. Another issue is that it is Mac OSX 10.6 only, and exports only to the iPhone, which sucks for those of us who prefer Windows or Linux platforms for development, or want to make apps for Android.

App Inventor


Google's very own offering for us non-techies comes in the form of the App Inventor. This web-based app creation tool is all kinds of cute due to the fact that "coding" comes in the form of fitting together puzzles pieces - and we all know, if two puzzle piece don't fit, they don't belong together. This helps non-coders through the notion of arguments and functions, and how all the parts of logical code fits together and are structured. While this isn't essentially a game creation toolkit, that hasn't stopped people, including an 11 year old boy, from making games using it.

Bad side of it, quite evidently, is that it only makes games for Android (naturally). The second drawback is one I mentioned before, the App Inventor is a general app making toolkit, so it's not essentially structured for games - which means platformers, shooters and the like will actually be harder to make in this environment. However, if you are making an essentially UI based game, like Druglord, you are good to go with App Inventor.

Adobe Air


We have been praying to the Tech Gods for this to happen, and it recently did - you can now make native mobile apps that work in Android and iOS using Flash. How? By using Adobe Air, of course. Adobe Air is, in their own words, a tool to "build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser". Putting this on the list might be a little misleading, because games on Flash requires some coding, but Actionscript, the coding language of Flash, is a language that many designers are familiar with, and is one that was created with non-coders in mind. There are easily billions of tutorials available online in its instruction and learning it should not be much more than a hiccup.

Of course, like anything with Adobe, it's obscenely expensive. Of course, you can develop apps using the open-source Flex framework or Javascript, but really, the only real non-coder way to use Adobe Air is through the visual interface of Abobe Flash, and buying that will set you back a few hundred bucks at the very least. The second flaw is one I mentioned before - it's not quite code-free, since you'll have to delve into basic Actionscript to make stuff interactive, but like I said, it's not that hard.

PhoneGap + Construct2


Okie, I'm cheating a little by putting two tools into one sub-heading, but these are the two I use currently, and I'm really loving how they work so well together. The first and foremost reason for my love is that both are free to use (for now). Most of the game-making happens in Construct2, a HTML5-based game making software I covered previously, which is currently under "free beta". I'm not quite sure how long they will be in that state, but I intend to make the most of it. The Construct community is pretty small, but they are active and helpful. The toolkit itself is trivial to pick up - I got my first Construct game running in my browser in less than an hour, although it's not much more than clicking things that appear on screen randomly for points. The magic happens in PhoneGap, a tool which turns HTML5 apps into native mobile apps for almost ANY mobile platform imaginable. On top of that, PhoneGap offers a cloud compiling service, which basically means you can upload your project files for cross compilation on their server for ALL the platforms they support, then download the compiled executables back onto your computer when the process is complete. Brilliant.

Drawback to this is that PhoneGap and Construct2 don't know each other from the get go, and will require you to play matchmaker to get the relationship going at the start. You need to do a few geeky tweaks here and there while setting up (which I may write another post on in the near future), but once its done, you never have to worry about it again. The second flaw is a slight lack of documentation on Construct's functions. There are about 5 tutorials in all on the tool's website, and one of those tutorials is about how to write a good tutorial. So yeah, you get the point.