Which platform to choose to create a mobile game

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Developer Denis Zaritskiy has made an excellent selection of frameworks and engines for creating mobile games. We recommend reading to everyone who wants to replenish their knowledge of this topic and choose a tool to create their future game hit.

Many people dream of creating their own game. But before you start developing it, you need to decide on the game engine, of which there are a huge variety.

What is a game engine? In short, it is a set of systems that simplify the most commonly used functions of the game. You can, of course, write the engine from scratch yourself, but it will take an unreasonably long time. In this article, we will look at popular game engines for developing games for mobile devices. By comparing their capabilities, you can choose the one that suits you best and create your next big hit.

Let's take a look at the list!

Corona SDK

is a cross-platform game development engine for iOS and Android. The API allows you to make 2D games and also helps you create complex functions using the Lua-based API. Alternatively, you can monetize the Corona SDK with Corona Ads. Development with Corona is easy enough thanks to real-time testing.

Corona includes cool features like the Sublime Text plugin and many more. The Composer GUI, available on OS X, will provide you with a graphical environment where you can create levels for games and see how objects interact with each other using Corona's physics engine.

Unreal Engine

allows you to create high quality projects by a small group of developers due to powerful tools (in particular, visual scripting through Blueprint), open source code and the constant growth of the community.

There is a free version of Unreal Engine, the transition to the Pro version will cost a pretty penny.

uses C ++, with it you can develop games for iOS and Android. The engine has a powerful editor that contains several highly specialized editors. Mastering them will greatly help you in development. Some editors can even replace certain programs. The interaction of all these subsystems is simply a masterpiece.

The visualization in the editor is great. It's just that your eyes run up from the abundance of rendering options (related, for example, to lighting or to the complexity of shaders). Here you will find tons of cutting edge shaders that also come with the engine. Basically, Unreal offers the best rendering engine on the market. You can create amazingly beautiful scenes.

Unity

is considered one of the best game engines in the industry. There is a free version that can be used to create 2D and 3D games. It covers 24 platforms: mobile, VR, desktop, consoles and web platforms.

The engine supports three scripting languages: C #, (modification), (Python dialect). has a simple Drag & Drop interface that is easy to customize. It consists of various windows, so you can debug the game right in the editor. A project in Unity is divided into scenes (levels) - separate files containing their game worlds with a set of objects, scenarios and settings.

Phaser

is a framework for developing desktop and mobile HTML5 games based on the library. Supports rendering in Canvas and WebGL, animated sprites, particles, audio, various input methods and object physics. Phaser is open source software. This means that you can use the code without restrictions, but with the preservation of copyright notices in copies of the software, that is, in the text of your license you will need to add an indication of the copyright for this framework. He is well supported by Richard Davy and the community that has sprung up around him.

Cocos2d-x

launched in 2010 is an open source project licensed under the MIT license. Game development in Cocos2d-x is based on the use of sprites. With the help of these containers, all sorts of scenes are created, for example, game locations, or menus. The sprites are controlled using animation or program code in C ++, JavaScript or Lua. Thanks to the modern visual interface, sprites can be easily modified, moved, scaled and otherwise manipulated.

Big guys like,,,, use Cocos2d-x for game development.

Cocos2D

is an open-source framework compatible with Swift and Objective-C. It has support for iOS and OS X, as well as Android via the Android plugin (assuming your code is written in Objective-C). Swift support for Android is under development.

Projects in Cocos2d are built through SpriteBuilder, a graphical development environment that can be used to quickly create prototypes and games.

The scene is controlled through the CCDirector class, which can use multiple transitions with the CCTransition class. It offers class animation and actions such as move, scale and rotate CCAnimation from its CCAction class. Cocos2d has support for particle systems with the CCParticleSystem class and tile maps with the CCTiledMap class.

SpriteKit

2D engine optimized for creating games for Apple devices. It is based on the popular physics engine. Since the developers created it sharpened specifically for Apple devices, it significantly outperforms other engines in speed. Provides all the basic functions for creating graphics in games: support for OpenGL-ES shaders, lighting effects, animation, collision checking, text rendering, video, and so on.

CreateJS

is a collection of various libraries for creating open source games:

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EaselJS is a library based on. TweenJS is animation in Canvas. And she does an excellent job of doing it for you and simplifying many things. SoundJS, you guessed it, is designed to work with audio. PreloadJS helps manage and coordinate data loading.

These libraries can work together or separately. Each module is responsible for its own part of the work and does not overlap with the rest, therefore, if necessary, it can be replaced with a similar one in functionality from other developers. But for those who intend to use the entire set without changes, there is the possibility of linking them to make it easier to work and write code.

AndEngine

AndEngine is one of the best known free open source 2D game development engines for Android. AndEngine, like many other platforms, uses OpenGL for rendering and for physics via.

libGDX

is a cross-platform framework that is written in Java and works with OpenGL. Offers support for multiple platforms for publishing a game. Ingress (predecessor to Pokémon GO) was developed using libGDX. The community support is great too, so you can get great documentation to get the job done.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at several frameworks and engines for game development. You should now have an idea of which solutions will best suit your next mobile game development needs. Thank you for the attention. Hope this article was helpful to you.