Missing Details About Buildbox

Discussion in 'Buildbox General Discussion' started by martincho, Sep 14, 2019.

  1. martincho

    martincho Boxer

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    Trying to understand more about Buildbox before taking the plunge. The sales video on the home page is high on the sales part and somewhat low on answering important questions. I would redo it, throw away most of the slimy-feeling (sorry) part in the front and get down to business right away. For example (please, feel free to point me to relevant documentation):

    1- What are the available targets? iOS, Android, Web-based, PC native, MacOS native?

    2- What does BB produce? Source code? In what language or languages?

    3- Does BB (the company) have to host any part or all your game in any way?

    4- Does BB (the company) retain any telemetry whatsoever for your game? Usage stats? Advertising stats? Downloads? Etc.

    5- How does BB deal with migrations in various platforms? For example, Apple mandates updates to new API's, etc. Does what you build on BB exist above this fray and crosspile to whatever target at the time of release?

    6- I saw threads about people extracting source code and cloning BB games. Is this a thing on all platforms? Is this a particular weakness of BB? Is there a way to protect against this?

    7- If BB supports creation and deployment of web-based games, what are the technological details and requirements for this? Self hosting? With what stack? Code security? Are games self contained or do they require one to provide an infrastructure (database server, etc.)?

    8- BB3 documentation. In looking around it feels like BB3 documentation isn't finished yet. Is this true? If so, is there a published timeline to having full documentation for the current version?

    9- With almost all software these days there's what's sold to users and then there's the reality of what users have to deal with once they buy-in. That's just reality. What would you say are the top ten gotcha's with BB3 for someone who might come into this actually thinking this is point-and-click game creation? I don't, but that's the sales pitch, that's why I ask that specific question. Trying to understand reality vs. the sales pitch.

    We have a bunch of educational games we'd like to create. BB looks like it could be a nice time saver provided it doesn't turn into one of those deep dark holes one often ends-up diving into in software development. I am trying to get a sense of whether this will be a time-multiplier tool or a huge time suck. It might still be worth it, but it would be nice to understand this before jumping into the deep end of the pool.

    Thanks!
     
  2. Rusted

    Rusted Avid Boxer

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    Lol...wow lots of good questions and doesn’t even appear to be what most of us are asking for...to have BB3 be able to be as easy to use as BB2 is...BB3 is not really more than a core product still...with BB3 no coding software you can script it however you want...but don’t think for a minute there is even a simple node to make a magnet, invincibility, ch age gamespeed without coding it. I hope you find you answers but AFTER we find ours...the simple ones
     
  3. martincho

    martincho Boxer

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    Coding isn't a problem at all. I have 30 years of software development under my belt and the others I work with are experienced software engineers as well.

    The utility I see is more in the realm of rapid prototyping and not reinventing the wheel. I've created games and interactive software from absolute scratch in the past (meaning, build a custom game engine in C or C++ and go from there). If Buildbox is able to accelerate some of the structural drudgery and allow software developers to focus on the important bit that would be of value.

    As an example, I asked the question about iOS because we had several apps in the Apps Store at some point in time. Apple decided to force and update to the new-more-better-good framework. That was a ton of work and in some cases hardly worth the effort. If something like Buildbox can abstract away from that stuff and allow a game to exist at a higher level such that an "export" or "compile" process --with some manual help-- was all that was necessary to migrate it would be of value as well.

    Not sure if my questions are beyond the audience for which Buildbox is intended. I know from experience not to jump into any of these "build it quick with almost no effort" frameworks without doing a bunch of research because, more often than not, they end-up being massive time sinks. It's like adopting Wordpress only to discover you have to spend $100K in customization before it will do what you want it to do.
     

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