GameSalad, the game creation software behind Tiny Balls and Zombie Drop, announced that the latest version can export HTML5 games for the browser or Apple App Store.

In the announcement yesterday, GameSalad said, “By harnessing the power of an emergent technology like HTML5, GameSalad developers will have a distinct advantage in reaching a wider audience than any other development platform.” This audience includes iOS devices as any developer who publishes to the GameSalad Arcade, their own game marketplace, will also be able to publish to the Apple App Store. The post also highlighted the rumors about Facebook’s Project Spartan: “Many of you have heard about the big plans that Facebook has for HTML5… We’re excited to be a part of the next generation of distribution platforms.”

GameSalad’s flagship product, GameSalad Creator, allows developers to create games without code. Instead, games are created using graphical programming — game entities, attributes, and bits of logic are dragged and dropped around on the stage and levels are edited in place. Creator’s testing suite lets developers easily test on all platforms and provides profiling of memory and frames rate. The software is freemium — the free version allows unhindered game creation and publishing to iOS, Mac OS X and browsers, and the premium (USD $499/yr) allows white-labeling, promotional tie-ins and premium support.

Unfortunately, GameSalad Creator doesn’t seem to support much in terms of external communication: Neither the forums or FAQ mention integration with third-party services, such as Playtomic‘s analytics or even your own backend services. If you’re ok with your games being self-contained, Creator is for you. But if you’re planning to build the next real-time browser-based WarCraft, you’ll probably have to look elsewhere.

The company recently announced that a GameSalad Creator-based game, Tiny Balls, overtook Angry Birds Rio on the Mac App Store — an impressive anecdote that proves the platform’s viability.

See: GameSalad Blog

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