What is the best alternative to&#x20;Felgo (formerly V-Play)?

Powerful config system that makes orx data-driven and provides an easy to use load/save system. See More

239 74

score 296 · Answer 2

Orx

Top Pro

Powerful config system

Top Con

Feature discovery and explanation could be better

Some features are not well explained / highlighted: for example, unless you use the interactive project initialization, you have to go over the tutorials and examples in the wiki to learn that there is an optional C++ layer, Scroll, developed on top of the C API. Similarly, some major information are missing from the website, wiki and Doxygen documention, and are left for the users to discover in source headers and INI template files, or by searching the forum (e.g. the 0,0 coordinate being the center of the screen and not top left, the list of all Orx scalar types and their use, etc). See More

Top Pro

Friendly community

Good friendly development community ready to help each other with tips and advice for setting up and best practices. See More

Top Con

No network support

Top Pro

Automatic hot-loading of resources

Automatic hot-loading of resources upon modification on disk, shortens drastically iteration times. See More

Top Pro

High performance

Written in C with high emphasis on memory and CPU efficiency. See More

Top Pro

Supports desktop and mobile

Supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS and Android. See More

Top Pro

Data configuration

Orx is a Data Driven engine that greatly reduces required code. You can configure object definitions, bodies, cameras, sound, animation, event tracks, etc. See More

Top Pro

Custom shader support

GLSL code can be added straight into data configuration files and can be applied to any texture: background or objects whivh allows for some amazing effects. All GLSL versions are supported, again by providing the shader language version in your configuration file. Parameters are supported and values over time for shader animation. See More

Top Pro

Flexible clock system

Clock system that provides time consistency and allows time stretching + high precision timers See More

Top Pro

Flexible and simple FX

Color and translation FX are simple to configure and apply to objects. See More

Top Pro

Good animation engine

Includes a chaining graph & custom animation events for synchronization. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Uses the zlib license. Lets you use Orx for free for any kind of projects, even for commercial ones. See More

Top Pro

Input controls and binding

All input devices are fully supported: Joysticks, Mouse, Gamepad, Keyboard and Touchscreen. Multiple physical devices and be mapped the same binding. See More

Top Pro

Excellent results on performance benchmark

Rated the fastest engine in the OpenFL’s BunnyMark since October 2015. See More

Top Pro

Great audio support

Samples for sound effects, or streams for music. All sounds can be groups via audio buses just like in a typical DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). All sounds can be spatial relative to the camera. See More

Top Pro

Viewport scheme allowing multiple views

Camera/viewport scheme allowing multiple views displayed with camera translation, zoom and rotation. See More

Top Pro

Good render support

Fragment (pixel) shader support, render to texture, MRT, easy composition and custom rendering support. See More

Top Pro

Easy post-processing/compositing for complex visual effects

Top Pro

Integrated runtime profiler

Integrated runtime profiler (with graphical display) to easily spot which parts of your game need to be optimized. See More

Top Pro

Collision handling and rigid body physics

Top Pro

Screenshot capture tool

Supports .bmp, .png, .jpg, .tga and .dds See More

Top Pro

Multi-Threading

Top Pro

Great IDE Support

Out of the box Windows support for: Visual Studio Codelite CodeBlocks gmake Out of the box Mac support for: XCode Codelite gmake Out of the box Linux support for: Codelite CodeBlocks gmake See More

Top Pro

Well-supported C++ wrapper

Orx provides a excellent c++ wrapper for object oriented design, called: orx/Scroll. You can, of course, roll your own. See More

Specs

License:zlib

Languages:C99

Dev platforms:Windows XP+, Mac OS X 10.6+, Linux

Desktop targets:Windows XP+, Mac OS X 10.6+, Linux

Corona SDK is completely free. That includes pro-tier plugins. See More

296 21

score 394 · Answer 3

Solar 2D (formerly Corona SDK)

Top Pro

Very simple to use

Top Con

Free, but not completely

Top Pro

Free

Top Con

Making a device build requires internet connection

To build your app for the device (iOS/Android/AppleTV) Corona requires to fetch resources from online. This would include base application template and plugins. This allows not to perform local build or use Xcode or Android Studio to do a build. Even Large games/apps would build very fast with good internet connection. Your code never leaves computed. Corona SDK would transfer some information to determine which plugins and pieces has to be transferred in order to make a final steps in build. As a bonus - you get basically one button press to get from your Corona Simulator game to game on a device. See More

Top Pro

Corona Simulator

Corona SDK ships with Corona Simulator, which runs your game/app directly on your PC/Mac and updates every time you make changes. It provides immediate feedback to your actions, you can see your changes right on the screen, without necessity to make build to device. Getting instant feedback really boosts tenfold prototyping and development speed. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation and lots of tutorials

Top Pro

Content scaling

It's easy to create a game that looks good on many different sized mobile devices. See More

Top Pro

Live builds - update builds running on a device automatically

With the live build feature, once you have created a build and installed on a device, you get lightning fast turnaround times because any change on the code or data is updated to the devices running the game (within the local WiFi) immediately. So changes can be tested on the real hardware within a very few seconds. What's even more impressive, this even works flawless with multiple devices running the game. You have to use it to learn how good of a feature this is while development and even more, while doing QA. Imagine fixing bugs and everyone of your QA team/friends/whoever helps to get your game done, has all changes on his device without doing anything but waiting 5 seconds - outstanding. See More

Top Pro

Lua syntax

Uses the great and easy-to-learn Lua programming language. See More

Top Pro

Very comprehensive API

It's very quick to get things up and running with Corona SDK. The API is extensive and while it's not 100% feature-complete with the iOS API, it's close enough that you could create tons of games and never run into a roadblock. The API docs can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Amazing learning curve

Corona does not throw photoshop-like madness full of buttons editor. You can go as fast as you want, learning and building game from ground up. Eventually, you'll learn how much corona is doing for you. But to start you don't have to master complex editor software. It's a great tool to learn to start game development if you want to learn how to program and make games. Your experience will be 100% transferable to any other Pro game engine. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform desktop and mobile

Corona works on OS X, Windows and Android (including Kindle Fire & Nook). See More

Top Pro

Marketplace for 3rd party plug-ins

Top Pro

Great community

Top Pro

Ability to call any native (C/C++/Obj-C/Java) library

Top Pro

Completely free

Since Corona SDK became Solar2D, it's completely free, as only some third-party plugins are paid. See More

Top Pro

Open Source

Since Corona SDK became Solar2D, it's completely open source under MIT license. See More

Top Pro

Well supported

Specs

Price:Free

Languages:Lua

Dev platforms:Windows; Macintosh

Desktop targets:Windows; Macintosh

According to the website, Flutter is still in its early stages of development. See More

394 50

score 211 · Answer 4

Flutter

Top Pro

Open source

Top Con

Still in development

Top Pro

Great developer tools debug/hotreload/analyser

Top Con

Based on Dart language

Dart is a Java like language, easy to learn and startup fast for millions of Java developers. BUT if you have to learn it ... it's a con. See More

Top Pro

Based on Dart language

Dart is a Java like language, easy to learn and startup fast for millions of Java developers. See More

Top Con

Dart is unpopular and never gained serious community traction like Kotlin or Java

Top Pro

A single codebase for iOS AND Android

Top Con

Does not support 32-bit iOS devices

If you plan on targeting iPhone 5, 5C or earlier, you can forget about Flutter. See More

Top Pro

Fast

The developer's goal is to allow people to make apps running at 120 FPS. See More

Top Con

Google has a bad history with product loyalty

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac and Linux

Desktop targets:announced Windows

Mobile targets:Android and iOS

Popular Language Bindings:Dart

Support for iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows (both OpenGL and DirectX), Windows 8 Store, Windows Phone 8, PlayStation Mobile, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and the OUYA console with even more platforms on the way. See More

211 32

score 135 · Answer 5

MonoGame

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Top Con

Slow rate of updates

Versions 3.9 is overdue by a year, and version 4.0 is set to release in 2040. See More

Top Pro

Open source

All the code is available to you ensuring you'll have the ability to make changes when you need to or even port to whole new platforms. See More

Top Con

Non-Windows tools are a bit funky

Monogame support for Xamarin Studio or Monodevelop is a bit shaky especially for library references. Only good non-Windows IDE compatible with MonoGame is Rider and that costs money & isn't open-source. See More

Top Pro

Well-known and documented API

The framework implements the XNA 4 API, so games made in XNA can be ported to other platforms using this. This was the same API used by the Xbox Live Indie Games platform so there's lots of documentation online for it. See More

Top Pro

Managed code

By leveraging C# and other .NET languages on Microsoft and Mono platforms you can write modern, fast, and reliable game code. See More

Top Pro

Good community

The community MonoGame has to offer is helpful and mature. See More

Top Pro

Performance on desktop

The performance on desktop platforms matches that of C++, but you still get all the pleasant features that C# has to offer. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Languages:C#

Mobile targets:Android, IOS, Windows phone

Godot has a mature 2D engine with many features used by modern 2D games. See More

135 27

score 2148 · Answer 6

Godot

Top Pro

Fully dedicated 2D engine, no hacks

Top Con

Primarily supports own language (GD Script)

Although C# is also supported by Godot, it is only supported by a separate version, and Mono must be downloaded separately. While GDScript is very accessible, and if you know Python you'll pick it up fast, having to learn a new language to fully make use of the platform can be a bit discouraging. And for those learning to code as well as learning Godot for the first time, many would rather learn a language they can 'take with them' when they explore other platforms in the future. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

The executable is portable and less than 40 MB in size. See More

Top Con

C++ Engine API not very friendly

The base C++ code from Godot is not documented, it's hard to set it up, to compile and hard to extend, it could use better programming standards. See More

Top Pro

Under constant development

This engine barely released one year ago has more than 1000 forks on github and about 100 developers. Not only that just a bit of browsing trough issues you will quickly find out the dev community loves new esp free technology and does not shy away from completely rewriting parts of the engine. The audio engine is being completely rewritten to use threads and so forth. See More

Top Con

Annoying minor bugs

Minor bugs can go unaddressed for some time, due to it being a free program. See More

Top Pro

User friendly UI for all your team

Non-programmers (musicians, artists, etc) can join the development easily. See More

Top Con

GDScript is quite immature language

GDScript is copy of python and the real problem is, it is not python. Which means it cannot have all the power and new features that is available in Python or other programming language. It does have some good features but it is not good enough for what you need if you want to deep dive into game development. You can just feel that by the godot team is solving that matter by supporting mono version. Because C# is popular in other game engine and it contains all the new features that is available from new programming language. If i give you very simple example for why GDScript is immature, GDScript does not support asynchronous programming. Which is very efficient for performance of your game. You may mention about multi-threading because asynchronous programming is one way of multi-threading. However If you try that in Godot, you cannot multi-threading where you want to implement asynchronous system. For example, Autoload (Fake singleton) where you want to manage data in real time. Autoload is not real singleton. It is not a separated thread that manage data. Therefore everything is synchronous in autoload. Even though you create new thread from Autoload script, your game will just stop and wait for your thread to finish its task... See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Godot is licensed under MIT license. Anyone can grab the source from here, and compile the engine themselves. See More

Top Con

Godot 3/4 split

The recent release of Godot 4 brings new features, but isn't yet fully documented, and performance may not be as optimized. See More

Top Pro

Editor and runtime are fully cross-platform

You can run Godot on all 3 major operating systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) and build your game to all available platforms from each without any platform-specific work needed. All platforms including Linux are supported first class. See More

Top Con

No console targets

Given that you can target both desktops and consoles with the same code base in other engines, the lack of support for consoles in Godot is pretty hard to get past if targeting desktops for a game. But asking for an open-source engine to target consoles is probably too much to ask. But it would be interesting to see some legacy consoles targeted even if current ones cannot be. See More

Top Pro

Drag & drop interface

Many parts of the editor allow you to drag & drop, which makes working with assets and scene trees a joy. See More

Top Con

It's hard to learn

Top Pro

The list of supported languages is growing

Officially, Godot supported languages for now will be GDScript, C#(Mono), VisualScript and C++. See More

Top Con

Difficult to optimize

Godot has an OOP architecture. Everything is an object internally and data is spread among many classes, thus it's difficult to optimize (i.e. not cache friendly, difficuly to vectorize or paralellize, etc). Read about "Data Oriented Design" for more info about the problems and solutions. See More

Top Pro

Can be deployed to multiple platforms

Deploy games to desktops (Windows/OS X/Linux), smartphones (iOS/Android/BlackBerry), and the web (HTML5 via Emscripten). See More

Top Con

Strange terminology at its base

Scenes can be made up of other scenes. That makes some sense. But even the smallest object (or prefab or asset) in a scene -- such as that spoon on the table or the marble on the floor -- is still called a scene... except when it's called a node. This is a bit odd for those coming from other engines. With all the great decisions behind the basic design of this engine, the choice of this term from all the potential other terms out there seems really out of place and only serves as a constant reminder that not everything about Godot is great. See More

Top Pro

Integrated animation editor

Every property can be animated. See More

Top Con

No built-in way to import atlases

Godot does not have an easy and automatic way to import atlases created by other tools. However, there are plugins that can be used to import atlases from other engines. See More

Top Pro

Built-in physics

Add physics to 2D and 3D scenes, through rigid and static bodies, characters, raycasts, vehicles and more. See More

Top Con

2DPhysics is weak compared to Box2d

Box2d has much more features. See More

Top Pro

Unified game editor interface

All the game development work is done inside one program: the engine editor. The scripting is done in the same program. No need for Eclipse or other front-end editors. See More

Top Con

NoAdmob or other AdNetwork support

Godot has no native support for implementing advertisements into your game. See More

Top Pro

Instancing and node concept makes sense

The node and the instancing concept work very well and helps developers to structure content efficiently. See More

Top Con

Many buggy and half-finished features

Top Pro

Fun to use

An important aspect that can't be grasped without using the engine for a few days. The Interface is evolving nicely and making games is just fun. See More

Top Con

Hard for a Unity user

Coming from a Unity background, Godot engine is hard. See More

Top Pro

Internationalization of the editor

You can change the language shown in menus. Godot translations can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn scripting language

Godot has their own scripting language called GDScript. The scripting language is easy to learn with Python-like syntax, but it is not Python. It's very powerful, easy to learn, and it's free of unnecessary things because it was custom built for optimized integration with the Godot Engine. It can be used to add custom behaviors to any object by extending it with scripting, using the built-in editor with syntax highlighting and code completion. A built-in debugger with breakpoints and stepping can be used and graphs for possible bottlenecks can be checked. See More

Top Pro

Really good community

The community is great and really cares about the engine. It is easy to get help and to be part of Godot's future. See More

Top Pro

Creating editor tools is a breeze

Godot Engine is itself a Godot game. By adding the "tool" keyword to the top of a script, you can design extensions for the editor itself INSIDE the editor. Integrating these editor scripts into a bundled plugin for sharing is extremely easy to do. See More

Top Pro

Friendly towards Version Control Systems

The engine is build not only to support version control but to really use it. Scene files for example which usually get compiled into some sort of unreadable data stay in a text format - that way you can actually see your changes in a version control system like Git. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't need to be installed into the system

Godot is very portable, you can download the file from a website then put it on a USB and run it on your other computer without any troublesome errors. See More

Top Pro

Easily expanded scripting system

With 3.0's addition of NativeScript and PluginScript via GDNative, developers can easily define bindings for new scripting languages. In addition to the primarily supported C++, GDScript, VisualScript, and C# languages, the community has contributed D, Nim, and Python as well with more on the way. See More

Top Pro

Incredible documentation after 3.2.2 beta

The documentation used to be weak, but now we have nathen with his help the documentation is the strongest advantage. See More

Top Pro

Scene Based editing

Godot gives you the ability to create scenes to make your life easier, with reusable objects and things you want to incorporate in your games. This makes the game making processvery streamlined and organized. See More

Top Pro

Built-in documentation linked to the internal ScriptEditor

The editor has a fully searchable index of class API documentation for everything the engine offers (NOT just a web interface). You can easily open the documentation for any class by Ctrl-clicking the class's name in the in-engine text editor for scripts. See More

Top Pro

Simple and readable codebase

The engine's source code is easy to read and understand with a self-documenting approach to code design. You don't have to wait months or years for other people to fix an engine bug that is important to your game. Often times, you can spend an hour or two of your own time to fix whatever problems you encounter yourself. See More

Top Pro

Easy to get involved

No need to learn anything with node, you can build a game without typing a line of code + has visual scripting. See More

Top Pro

Engine is yours

There is no royalty and the game you made + engine itself is yours. See More

Top Pro

Can be installed on Steam

You can easily install Godot via the Steam store. See More

Top Pro

Comprehensive tooling

In addition to the scene editor and the script editor (with debugger), the engine also provides a tile map editor, an animation editor (not just for rigs), a performance monitor, a network profiler, and an audio bus console. See More

Top Pro

It has a visual scripting tool (Godot 3)

It has a great visual scripting tool. It's a great choice if you don't like to code. This was however removed in Godot 4, so you will need to use the (still supported) Godot 3 branch for visual scripting. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android

Popular Language Bindings:GDScript, C#, C++

2D game creation was a major feature request from the Unity community and was added with version 4.3. 2D is provided in both the Pro and Free distribution of Unity. See More

2148 325

score 660 · Answer 7

Unity 2D

Top Pro

Built into Unity 4.3+

Top Con

Lacks critical features

Vertices can't be animated, so you can't have ANY organic feel (like... lungs breathing). Parent bone can't be animated without affecting the children. This is especially impeding for organic feel, again. No option to show & unshow assets (or it is hidden), like for switching weapon on your character for exemple. See More

Top Pro

Integrates with Mecanim

Mecanim brings state machines and blending to 2D bone animation. The state machine editor allows for designers and programmers to visually create a Finite State Machine (FSM) to control when animations should play. Mecanim also allows for blending so an animation can transition smoothly between two states without the need of in between frames made by an animator. See More

Top Con

Poor script interface for texture atlases

Accessing individual sprites within an atlas texture is possible at runtime, but requires use of the Resources folder subsystem. See More

Top Pro

Sprite Sheet and Bone based animation supported

Both types of 2D animation for game development are supported in Unity’s system and can be used interchangeably in the timeline. See More

Top Pro

Easily change sprites dynamically

Usually used for character customization, programmers can change any sprite in a bone animation at runtime easily by referencing the bone and loading the new sprite from the resources folder. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Languages:C#

The whole interface is intuitive and easy to learn: each part of the game can be designed using visual editors. The objects editor is used to create the objects of the game, the scene editor help you to build the levels of your game and the events editor allows to give life to the whole game without programming. See More

660 172

score 758 · Answer 8

GDevelop

Top Pro

Easy to use

Top Con

No support for atlas/tilemap and sprite sheet

At this point, you need to separate the tileset maps or character animation sprite sheet before importing it to the engine, but the developers are working on this feature. See More

Top Pro

Free and open-source

GDevelop's runtime libraries are MIT licensed. It can be used freely for projects of any type and there are no royalties associated with publishing games developed with GDevelop. See More

Top Con

GUI is slow to load

This makes doing the simplest things, like looking at one of your maps, hard to do. In looking into this program, it can stall a PC while trying to load a sample map. See More

Top Pro

Powerful events system to create games without programming

No need for coding using this system which is clear and powerful: events are composed of conditions and actions. Actions are launched when conditions are fulfilled. This is a very friendly way of making games and is still efficient for advanced usage, contrary to most other "block"/"drag'n'drop" systems. See More

Top Con

No 3d, not even fake 3d

This is a 100$ 2d-only game engine. You could of course use pre-rendered 3d graphics, but your games themselves will exist only in the x and y axes. See More

Top Pro

Open source plugin SDK

The plugin SDK is open source, so if you want to extend it, you can. See More

Top Con

It's very slow

Although suggested otherwise, GDevelop doesn't compile the games - it just adds wrappers so each OS can run the HTML5 game it creates. That means it runs much, much slower than other engines that do compile games. See More

Top Pro

Lots of features to build games

The engine includes pathfinding, physics engine, multitouch support, custom hitboxes, platformer engine, tiled maps, multiple layers and cameras out of the box. All of these features can be used without programming knowledge, using the visual editors. See More

Top Con

No cross-compiler

The Windows and Linux versions of GDevelop can each compile a native application; but the Windows version cannot compile for Linux, nor vice versa. See More

Top Pro

Quickly add behaviors to objects

Prebuilt behaviors can be added to objects. This is a very efficient way to add a physics engine or make a platformer game. Lots of behaviors are included, from the most advanced (Physics, platformer, top-down movement) to really simple one (like the behavior to destroy objects when outside the screen or the one to drag objects with mouse or touch). And you still have full controls over your game as behaviors can be modified using the events! See More

Top Con

Optional subscription not mentioned on main site

While the engine is free and open source as stated on the main website, it does not mention that some optional features and services are actually activated through a paid subscription (two tiers: 2€ and 7€). Those features are: no nag screen shown when debugging, additional metrics available on games dashboard, access to more than 2 cloud exports per day (unlimited local export can be done without subscription, provided the right packaging tools are installed and configured), easy removal of GDevelop splash screen (can be done manually without subscription). See More

Top Pro

New documentation for gd5 is good for starting

A new doc is improving for gd5 that is nice for beginners and after that you can learn more from examples. Also, gd4 wiki is still there. See More

Top Con

Behaviors of Objects are rather generalized

Since it has a fully GUI editor, the objects you are allowed to add in your game are pretty generalized (PhysicsObject, TiledSprite, PlatformerObject, etc). This limits the freedom of a game developer while making a game, as the object msut follow the preset behaviours imposed on it. See More

Top Pro

Constant updates

New releases and bug fixes are consistent. New updates are released anywhere within 2 weeks or 1 month from the last one. Its auto-updater also does it job very well making life a lot easier. See More

Top Pro

Online version available, compatible with iOS and Android

Thanks to its open source nature, GDevelop-App.com was built over the GDevelop engine. GDevelop-App.com is a complete game creator similar to GDevelop, available directly in your browser and compatible with iPad and most Android tablets and phone! The app is perfect for making games directly from your sofa and you can even start a game on GDevelop-App and export it to open it inside GDevelop. See More

Top Pro

Multilanguage support

GDevelop is available in many languages and even community can help in translations. See More

Specs

Languages:C++, JavaScript

Dev platforms:Windows 7+, macOS 10.11+, Linux, Web

Desktop targets:Windows 7+, macOS 10.11+, Linux

It's possible to create a game with absolutely no art or coding skills, so even complete beginners can make something. See More

758 64

score 174 · Answer 9

RPGMaker

Top Pro

Easy to jump into using an intuitive WYSIWYG editor

Top Con

You have to code when you want something didn't built in

You know,RM series' default walk animation only has three frames.If you want to enhance,you have to code by yourself——especially majority of it's user are newbies. See More

Top Pro

Large and active community

The engine has seen multiple iterations since 1995, so a large online community exists that is always willing to help each other out. See More

Top Con

No Hardware accelerate

You'll get a bad performance when you have big animations,especially in MV,which can easily change into higher resolution. See More

Top Pro

Ruby / Javascript support provides depth to more experienced developers

With a script editor that uses a modified version of Ruby, it's possible to go well beyond the traditional RPG with this engine. Note: XP and VX use Ruby, the latest version "MV" uses Javascript for scripting. See More

Top Con

No 3D support

None of them have 3D support, it is possible only with manual scripting which could be difficult for beginners. See More

Top Pro

It's an open engine

It's possible to use custom editors from the community, edit libraries,include libraries,etc (MV Only) See More

Top Con

MV Does not have a "REAL" Android export.

MV has an export to HTML5 - which can run on any browser including android. It is however not a "native" app export. See More

Top Pro

Multi-platform

MV supports HTML5 exports, so it is easier than ever to make your game work on iOS, android, OSX,Linux or Windows. See More

Top Con

Inconsistent included visual assets

Included visual assets within MV have inconsistent presentation. Though RPMMV does contain enough to make a small basic title, the visual assets don't often look like they should be mixed on-screen. See More

Top Pro

Inbuilt database and multplayer plugins, providing you the scalfolding to customising your projects with ease

The inbuilt database which binds to game saves or can be made persist allows great power within your logic. Also a plugin called 'Alpha.net' provides multiplayer. This combination can allow great customisation of the engine, allowing a powerful 2D game to be made with little to no coding experience. See More

Top Con

No built-in realtime battle system

RPG Maker series has only turn based battle systems, unless scripts/Plugins made by the community are used. See More

Top Pro

Greater Map layers

MV Mapping uses an additional layer to create better depth. See More

Top Con

Conversion to MV difficult

Older iterations of RPG Maker use smaller sprite sizes that require manual conversion to use older RTP assets and older assets are more robust. See More

Top Pro

MV has HTML5 export

You can now HTML5 export your projects, so you could theoretically host your game on your webserver, and have your friends play the game without ever having to install a single thing. See More

Top Pro

A cheap license that allows using the software commercially

There are several versions of RPG maker, with MV being the latest and most fully featured: MV ($79.99), VX Ace ($69.99), VX ($59.99) and XP ($24.99), 2003 ($19.99). See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS

Languages:JavaScript

Desktop targets:Windows, macOS, Web

Mobile targets:Android, iOS

The project does not seem to be active: there has been no new commit since mid-2019, the Twitter feed for the engine stopped posting news in 2018, and the forum is offline as of May 2021. See More

174 22

score 95 · Answer 10

Oxygine

Top Con

Inactive

Top Pro

Games can be built as HTML5 applications

Most interesting is ability to build C++ Oxygine application for Web via Emscripten. So you write C++ code and it will compile it to HTML5/JS. See More

Top Con

Little community support

Oxygine is a young framework. It was first released in 2013 and has yet to gather a large community. As of February 2016, the forum had just 123 members. See More

Top Pro

Functionality can be extended with a bunch of available extenions

All of them available publicly at github. oxygine-movie for playing Theora movies with alpha channel oxygine-sound player for ogg sound/music with streaming oxygine-freetype library oxygine-billing for in-app-purchases on Android/iOS oxygine-spine for playing Spine animations oxygine-magicparticles for playing particles made with MagicParticles See More

Top Con

Not many tutorials available

There are not many tutorials available that teach developers on how to make a game with Oxygine from scratch. Because of this, it may be harder to pick it up or to start learning game development by using this engine. See More

Top Pro

Will be familiar to users of ActionScript3/Flash API

If you are familiar with ActionScript3/Flash API, then you will find it easy to begin working in Oxygine. Oxygine is much like Flash in C++, as its Event Handling model is very close to that of ActionScript 3 and SceneGraph. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use C++ API with optional C++11 features

Oxygine is written in C++. It provides easy to use API, which is designed with "do more with less code" philosophy. It uses a managed scenegraph system that takes care of rendering and updates, and provides ability to extend with custom rendering and updates. See More

Top Pro

Free, open source and cross-platform

Oxygine is a free framework that works on OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5. It's licensed under MIT with source code available on GitHub. See More

Top Pro

Robust

It's very rare to experience bugs with Oxygine. See More

Top Pro

Allows playing movies with alpha channel

Using oxygine-movie extension for Oxygine you could play in your game any videos encoded with Theora codec. You movie could have alpha channel and used as simple sprite instead of classic spreadsheet animations. See More

Top Pro

Allows for flexible contol over draw processes

Top Pro

Fast

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

Languages:C++

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux

If you don't have your Chromebook, Construct 3 will run in the browser. See More

95 18

score 30 · Answer 11

Construct 3

Top Pro

Runs in the browser

Top Con

Subscription based

It is subscription based pricing. It might not be for everyone. See More

Top Pro

Fast and small

Construct 3 loads really fast. See More

Top Pro

Timeline

It has a timeline feature which allows you to make amazing animations. See More

Top Pro

No installation required

As it runs in the browser you can load it on any computer and show your friends your work really quickly. See More

Top Pro

Works on Chromebooks

Construct 3 works on a Chromebook without any issues. See More

30 8

score 98 · Answer 12

Gideros

Top Pro

Instant on device testing

Gideros provides on device players for iOS and Android that can be used to instantly try out your code directly from the Gideros IDE. See More

Top Con

Few resources, but growing

Gideros has a small community, and therefore do not have as many "How to make a game" tutorials. However, there are a couple of excellent books available that can take you through the fundamentals. See More

Top Pro

Auto scaling and image resolutions

Gideros provides an easy way to target various screen sizes by providing automatic scaling options and choosing the best image resolution based on device screen automatically See More

Top Con

The Gideros IDE is not as fully featured as other IDEs

The Gideros IDE is not as fully featured as other IDEs, but you can easily use the very powerful and compatible ZeroBrane Studio IDE. See More

Top Pro

Local builds

You can build apps without an online dependency. See More

Top Pro

Friendly & helpful community

Gideros has an active forum where you can find friendly and helpful advice. See More

Top Pro

New features and improvements are released regularly

Gideros is being constantly updated and improved by the main developers. See More

Top Pro

All in one studio, no complicated setup

Gideros Studio is incredibly easy to set up. Once installed it is very easy to create a new project or open one of the many example projects. Trying out an example on the desktop is two clicks away. See More

Top Pro

Easy plugin architecture

Gideros Studio has a very powerful feature which enables developers to use a C/C++/Java/ObjC library next to Lua. This way it's possible to call the library functions under Lua, get the results and interpret them directly under Gideros Studio. See More

Top Pro

Supports many platforms

Gideros supports iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, WindowsRT, Windows Phone and HTML5 platforms. See More

Top Pro

Amazing 2D performance

2D performance is amazing. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to learn

Gideros uses the Lua programming language which is very easy to learn (and very powerful). There are some excellent video tutorials too, to help you get started. The Gideros forum community are also very friendly and helpful if you any any problems. See More

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX

Languages:Lua

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX

25% of iPhone games are made using Cocos2d-x. This means you will not be alone in development, and will have access to a large community. You'll know you are developing for an engine that works. See More

98 22

score 345 · Answer 13

Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator

Top Pro

A proven engine for mobile development

Top Con

Poor support and non-existent community

Up until 2013, this was one of the best engines around. However, since then it was bought by a Chinese company and began stagnating - it's virtually in a slow death. Most developers abandoned Cocos in favor of more modern solutions leaving the community weak and the forums with little or no traffic. Although the Cocos2d-x Forum seems to have a decent community going. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Documentation includes a programming guide, API reference, video tutorials and massive reference test code project showing all functions and giving working code to the user. See More

Top Con

No Graphics user interface

Top Pro

Supports 3D models with skeleton animation

A new feature since Cocos2d-x v3.1 is support for 3D models (in your 2D game), not only this but support for skeleton animations is included too! This awesome feature allows for impressive characters in your game along with easier, more fluid and realistic animations. See More

Top Con

Modest functionality

Almost all free alternatives are more convenient, faster, and more functional. See More

Top Pro

Great script language support

It supports Lua and Javascript with full feature support. Especially with Cocos2d-JS you can develop games cross web and native, and the native solution have great performance with JS Bindings, much better than hybrid solution. See More

Top Pro

Highly active community for questions and support

Cocos2d-x forums are active. See More

Top Pro

OpenGL hardware acceleration

Top Pro

Future-proof

Cocos2d-x is not only open source but also supported by Chukong Technologies of China and USA. Regularly updated and adding support for the latest technologies. 2014 has already seen the release of Version 3, a new Cocos Studio development toolkit (optional) and support for new technologies like skeleton animation systems Spine and Adobe DragonBone. See More

Top Pro

Greater performance than high level APIs

Cocos2d-x is C++ based engine and it has CPU advantages for most platforms because of that. It uses polygonal mesh methods for sprite rendering for using GPU advantages. (You also use quad methods for benefit CPU). See More

Top Pro

No external dependencies

Because it is based on Pyglet. See More

Top Pro

One code for all platforms

On top of supporting pretty much all existing platforms (except consoles), Cocos Creator (Cocos's IDE) allows you to write 1 code that runs on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and HTML5 (not Linux though). See More

Top Pro

Easy integration of 3rd party plugins

Through the use of SDKBox you can easily integrate 3rd party SDKs and plugins for each version of Cocos2D (Lua, C++ or JavaScript), you just choose the SDKs to integrate and SDKBox will do the rest. For example, if you want to add a rating plugin, you use sdkbox::PluginReview::init(); and if you want to add the Vundle Ad Network SDK, you use the one packaged in SDKBox SDKBOX sdkbox::PluginVungle::init();. See More

Top Pro

Allows for easy debugging

It has a built-in Python interpreter that allows for easy debugging. See More

Top Pro

Very good IDE

Cocos Creator (Cocos' IDE) comes with scene editing, UI editor, animations & particle editors and whatnot. It's also easy to use and pretty intuitive if you read the official documentation & tutorials. Way way better than the old CocoStudio. See More

Top Pro

Great video tutorials

Hundreds of video tutorials available. See More

Specs

Languages:C++; Lua; JavaScript; TypeScript (Creator only)

Dev platforms:Windows; macOS

Desktop targets:Windows; macOS; Linux; HTML5 (Creator only)

The LÖVE forums are extremely helpful. With people checking the forums every day, it won't take long to receive answer to your questions on the Support board, receive feedback on games you post in the Projects board, as well as have a chat about the LÖVE engine while learning tricks to use in the very active General board. If you need an immediate answer though, or just want to chat, there is a very active and helpful IRC channel. See More

345 61

score 532 · Answer 14

LÖVE

Top Pro

Active and very friendly community

Top Con

Not very powerful

The engine has very few modules and only the really required one, you'll have to do almost everything from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Uses the fantastic Lua for scripting

Lua is an embeddable scripting language designed to be lightweight, fast yet powerful. It is used in major titles such as Civilization as well as a lot of indie games. Lua is very popular because it provides "meta language" features. You can implement object-oriented structures, or pure procedural functions, etc. It has a very simple C interface, and gives the engine developer a lot of flexibility in the language itself. Artists tend to love Lua too because it's very approachable, with plain and forgiving syntax. Lua is free open-source software, distributed under a very liberal license (the well-known MIT license). See More

Top Con

Game distribution is harder than it should

The process to create an executable could be streamlined: the dedicated wiki page is somewhat confusing, and the actual process either means relying on one of the various community-maintained tools or creating an executable manually for each platform. See More

Top Pro

Easy to understand and use

Lua2D handles loading the resources, reading input, playing sounds and displaying stuff on the screen. Only the logic is left for the developer to write. It also removes the overhead of having to use and learn a GUI game editor. All you need is a knowledge of Lua and your favourite text editor or IDE. See More

Top Con

More of an API than a game engine

It may come with graphical, audio and IO but it lack most features most game engines have such as UI system, pathfinding, etc. and you have to implement most of the stuff you might want manually. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS. See More

Top Con

Only for the very simple games

Top Pro

Open source and free

The LÖVE engine is licensed under The zlib/libpng License (which is very short and human readable) which allows you to use the source code and even modify it as long as you do not claim that the original source code is yours. You can obtain the code at this bitbucket repository and even help fix bugs and participate in the development of LÖVE. See More

Top Con

Documentation is very dry and technical

The site has plenty of tutorials, true, but they all read very technical, and explain very little. This might be too much for beginners, even for coding purposes, because of the fact that the specifics aren't explained well enough to learn effectively. The docs can be found frustrating to understand even the basics, such as tables or the like, because of how poorly they are explained, and how few examples are given before expecting you to be able to use them. See More

Top Pro

Many examples and libraries with source code

There are plenty of open source examples of games or components built by the community that are ready to use or learn from. See More

Top Con

Game distribution for Android is a pain in the Arse

It is like you're doing a science experiment. See More

Top Pro

Very good documentation

The LÖVE wiki provides full documentation of its easy to use Modules, which are conveniently located on the side bar of the wiki. It only takes seconds to find the module for love.keyboard, which provided a list of all functions along with arguments and examples where the function could be used. See More

Top Con

HTML5 support

Depends on love.js for HTML5 distribution which is old and incompatible with current Emscripten / LLVM version. See More

Top Pro

Great for prototyping

You can learn the basics very quickly and start making simple games in no time, even if you have no previous Lua knowledge. If you're a little experienced with LÖVE, you can prototype a 2D game with it in no time. See More

Top Con

Absolutely no GUI (no graphical interface)

This has no graphical interface at all, you have to know how to read script in order to know what you're looking at. After you've written the script for everything, you compile it to see the result. It's a very poor way to create a game, given how even most professional tools out there give you a GUI to work with and debug on the go. The lack of a GUI slows down the work by ten-fold, and it's just an inefficient use of your time. See More

Top Pro

Can develop within Android

It is possible to develop games directly on a tablet or cellphone with the Android system by using the experimental Android branch. See More

Top Con

The community seems juvenile

For example, some of the library include names such as HUMP, LUBE, AnAL. See More

Top Pro

Very good for education

That is a great tool for teaching novice programmers. Creating a game on LÖVE, you have to think about developing, not about the syntax of the language. See More

Top Pro

Many tutorials on the internet

Has several tutorials in several languages on the internet, mainly on Youtube. See More

Top Pro

C++ and Lua one of the best languages for gamedev

Because all professionals in gamedev use C++, and Lua the fastest scripting lang. See More

Top Pro

Cute name

So much love. See More

Specs

License:zlib

Languages:C++, Lua 5.1

Dev platforms:Windows Vista+ , macOS 10.7+, Linux, Android 4.0+

Desktop targets:Windows Vista+, macOS 10.7+, Linux

Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language. See More

532 92

score 128 · Answer 15

Ionic Framework

Top Pro

Cordova plugins

Top Con

Can be buggy

Ionic is still a young framework (version 1.0 was released in May 2015). There are still some quirks and bugs in the framework to work out, which you can see a list of on their Github. However Ionic is under active development and bugs are generally addressed quickly. See More

Top Pro

Large, friendly and active community

Ionic Framework is currently one of the most popular frameworks for hybrid mobile app development. This has resulted in a very large community of active users who contribute to the community by writing tutorials and answering questions. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Ionic is free to use and open source, resulting in an active and helpful community of users and contributors. See More

128 30

score 15 · Answer 16

jQuery Mobile

Top Con

The project is practically abandoned

The last release was in 2014. Samsung Tizen Advanced UI (TAU), for example, was started with JQuery, but it was forked off and completely rebuilt from scratch with jQuery concepts but without JQuery dependency itself. See More

Top Pro

Resources

With HTML5 development being relatively amateur jQuery Mobile has a vast selection of resources to assist. These resources include websites, books, apps and other frameworks, 3rd party plugins and extensions, and more. All of these can help ramp up and excel the project development cycle. See More

Top Con

Clunky and slow

Top Pro

ThemeRoller

An interactive tool that has been created to customize an apps theme. Users can import a current theme, make changes, and export the theme back to the app for integration. See More

Top Con

No MVC support

There is no included MVC support in jQuery Mobile. It is possible to achieve this, however, using other frameworks such as BackboneJS in combination with jQuery Mobile, but there are a few limitations. Specifically that MVC frameworks, such as BackboneJS or KnockoutJS, are not compatible with jQuery Mobile page routing. See More

Top Pro

Download Builder

To optimize application development jQuery Mobile provides a tool to allow the user to customize the framework. It contains the ability to pick and choose which modules to include and then bundles the framework so it contains only what is needed. See More

15 5

score 22 · Answer 17

ImpactJS

Top Con

Inactive

The last update was in 2014. See More

Top Pro

Extensive documentation available to support development

ImpactJS has an active user community that busily produces tremendous resources including videos, books, tutorials, walkthroughs and more. There are also comprehensive class documentation available. See More

Top Con

Cost of $99

While most HTML5 frameworks are offered as free open source projects, ImpactJS has a one time cost and no free option. See More

Top Pro

Excellent collision detection system

Impact provides 2 types of collision detection; static and dynamic collisions. Both of which are easily integrated into game development. See More

Top Pro

Extendable

Many plugins are available, including one called Impact++ which adds features like pathfinding and dynamic lighting. See More

Top Pro

Level editor

Built-in map editor with support for tiling, collision layers, and actors. See More

Top Pro

Optimized

Works with Box2d physics library, comes with all worthwhile elements for actors built in. See More

Top Pro

Truly cross-platform allowing developers to build for anything

Extending the reach of a game developed with ImpactJS is easy due to the cross-platform nature the framework. There are Considerations around performance, resolution and audio, however all can be appropriately addressed when in development. Works in the browser via Canvas, even on mobile. Easily translatable into a packaged app. See More

With the Developer edition of the product, there are absolutely no limits or requirements when selling your creations. You are free to make as much money as you want (this applies to the Standard edition too), and you don't have to include any logos or credits in your creations. See More

22 8

score 366 · Answer 18

Clickteam Fusion 2.5

Top Pro

Permissive runtime license agreement

Top Con

Some features are really outdated and major updates are few and rare

There are some features that could make the software a lot more powerful but Clickteam does not have the staff resources to handle updating the software to be competitive with similar software. See More

Top Pro

Upgrade discounts

If you buy Fusion 2.5, and later decide you want to upgrade to the Developer version, or in the case of moving from MMF2 to F2.5, the company offers upgrade discounts. See More

Top Con

Its Event Editor can be cumbersome if you are working on complex projects

While Fusion's visual programming event system is great to simplify things, it can be much more cumbersome to work with it than reading lines of code when you are working on a complex project. Especially if your events involve many nested conditions and lots of objects on the frame. You are able to group events and objects, but it doesn't help at all if there's lots of conditions on an event and it becomes pretty hard to read. See More

Top Pro

Export native runtime for all platforms

Be it Windows EXE, Android APK, iOS, HTML5 and Flash SWF, Fusion 2.5 is able to export your game to fast, truly native runtime for specified platform with a click. See More

Top Con

Many extensions not available on non-Windows platforms

A lot of community-made extensions are only written for Windows, making it hard to port your game to other platforms. See More

Top Pro

Intuitive drag & drop interface & visual event editor

CF2.5 uses a straightforward drag & drop editor that allows for easy level, animation and event creation without having to write a single line of code. See More

Top Con

It is very expensive

100$ to $400. See More

Top Pro

Developers work so closely with the user base

Dedicated Bug tracking system linked to user forum for ease of access. See More

Top Con

Many event 'gotchas', especially with object selection

Many events have very unpredictable selection behavior, e.g. the 'Create' action (where the selection depends on whether a selection list already exists). There is also a lot of subtle selection behavior, e.g. implicit object pairs for actions when an object is used in an expression. See More

Top Pro

Free version

A free version is available for download here. See More

Top Con

No native animator with curves, etc

Top Pro

Can also create Windows applications

CF allows creating Windows applications. Additionally, due to hundreds of available extensions, the process is quick. See More

Top Con

Poor native movements

The native non-physical movements are practically unusable if you don't want to use Box2D physics in your game. See More

Top Pro

Box2D physics engine included on all platforms

Clickteam Fusion 2.5 brings to you the box2D physics engine. See More

Top Con

Need to write C++ extensions when existing extensions don't cut it

If you need e.g. a Steamworks extension or 3D display extension, you need to move out from the event system and create extensions in C++ with a cumbersome API. Fusion does not have FFI calls like other programming languages. See More

Top Pro

Community-driven extensive object repository

Click Fusion has a great selection of extensions submitted by the community. The extensions cover a variety of game-building tasks including parsing of strings using up to two alternating delimiters using the "Tokenizer Object", generating random numbers without reusing them from multiple lists which can be refilled and distinctively replenished with the "Random Multipool Object" among others. See More

Top Con

No animation/object hierarchy

You need to position/rotate objects manually. See More

Top Pro

Not only is it the best, it is the original

This software has been around since 1994 (then called Klik & Play) and is still going very strong. Also, one of the founders of Clickteam was the developer of STOS BASIC and AMOS BASIC for the Atari ST and Amiga computers. See More

Top Con

Cannot script editor

You cannot script the IDE or editor with e.g. macros or custom functionality, like you can in other popular game engines. See More

Top Pro

A great unofficial community for Spanish-speaking users

A great community in Spanish where you will receive all the help you need to solve your doubts and problems. You'll also find all kinds of resources and materials in Spanish. Una gran comunidad en español en donde recibirás toda la ayuda que necesites para solucionar tus dudas y problemas. También encontrarás todo tipo de recursos, tutoriales y ejemplos en español. See More

Top Con

Slow event system

Since the event system is interpreted, complex frames will start to slow down. This is also caused by poor code reuse, as usually, you need to copy+paste events with new conditions, making it impossible to cache intermediate results. See More

Top Pro

Balanced feature set

An excellent compromise between ease of use, power, flexibility and ability to export to different platforms. Easy to learn for beginners with the ability to make complex things, of course, at the expense of a larger effort. Good rapid application development tool for making 2D games. See More

Top Con

Lack of native network multiplayer system, built-in database support, social media support

Top Pro

Supportive, passionate community

Any time you have a question or a problem, the community and the software developers are there to help you out either on forums or steam. The devs repond quickly to private messages or instantly on ClickConverse (chat). Additionally, many users have support sites with open source examples and tutorials. See More

Top Con

Exporters are separate purchases, and they are not cheap

Top Pro

Well-optimized

Runs well under high object numbers, particularly on PC and iOS thanks to hardware acceleration. See More

Top Con

No console/Linux exporters

Up to now, Clickteam has a console convert service. See More

Top Pro

Great IRL user events

Clickteam holds user conventions for customers to come along, meet the staff and hang out with people who they've met online. This furthers the community spirit which is so prevalent around Clickteam's products and it's a fantastic weekend. See More

Top Con

Simpler than Scratch

Fusion 2.5 is more Simpler than MIT'S Scratch! See More

Top Pro

It is very powerful for making 2D games, yet requires no traditional programming experience and very little to no higher math

There is no 'easy button' program that will make a good game for you with no hard work, and this software is no exception to that, but it does make the process easier. With the option of coding in either a spreadsheet style editor or a list style editor, the event based programming language reads more like English than traditional programming languages. This has made it ideal for me as I have a very hard time understanding traditional programming. I would say this is the perfect solution for people that want to make 2D games but who don't have a very mathematically oriented mind, and think more visually. Just like anything it can take some getting used to, but after following some tutorials and tinkering with it, you'll be able to create practically any kind of 2D game with it so long as you have the determination. See More

Top Con

The free edition is severely limited

Top Pro

Exports native mobile code, making great performance games

Top Pro

Great for non-game apps

Such as tools, utilities, multimedia projects, etc. See More

Top Pro

Great online store to get free and paid assets

Top Pro

Can create custom extensions

Top Pro

Visual (HLSL) effects

Top Pro

Great formula editor, which allows you to create complex maths and events with ease

Top Pro

Box2D physics engine

Top Pro

Stable

Have used fusion 2.5 through all of its iterations, even when it was owned by imsi as CNC ( click n create ) it has been very stable and projects have been known to run on almost any Windows based computer. The projects you create even run on future versions of Windows with never many issues. See More

Top Pro

3D powerful solution

Specs

License:Proprietary

Languages:c

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac

Desktop targets:Windows, Mac

Blueprints are authoring tools designed for non programmers so designers and other team members can help tweak and prototype. UE4's Blueprint scripts resemble flowcharts where each box represents a function or value, with connections between them representing program flow. This provides a better at-a-glance indication of game logic than a simple list of events, and makes complex behaviors easier to accomplish and games a lot faster to prototype. See More

366 91

score 824 · Answer 19

Unreal Engine 4

Top Pro

A visual scripting system for non-coders enables quick prototyping

Top Con

Very high build size

A blank project will build in to a minimum of 200 MB. See More

Top Pro

Lots of resources to learn from

Epic provides multiple official video tutorials, lots of free example projects and content, an extensive wiki and regular streams showing how to use latest features. See More

Top Con

Slow

Compared to other engines, UE4 seems to perform various actions considerably slower. Actions like starting the engine, opening the editor, opening a project, rebuilding shaders, updating references, calculating lightmaps, saving projects, etc take long enough to get irritating and end up wasting precious development time. See More

Top Pro

Powerful material/shader system

Allows a texture/material artist or VFX artist to create amazing effects from the ground up. See More

Top Con

Extremely long build times

Making a full rebuild, including engine can take a good 30minutes. If you plan to use Unreal professionally, you better get some licenses for Incredibuild as well. See More

Top Pro

Free development license, including source code

The engine, including full access to source code, is free to use; a 5% royalty is due only when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD. See More

Top Con

Hard engine for beginners

This engine not easy for beginners See More

Top Pro

Realistic graphics

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Especially when compared to its primary competitor, Unity. See More

Top Pro

Developers have full control of the engine and source code

UE4 gives full access to the C++ source code allowing editing and upgrading anything in the system. See More

Top Con

No drawcall batching, performance is very bad on mobile

There's no dynamic batching support to minimize drawcalls. There's InstancedStaticmesh concept in UE4, but it's 3d only, functionally limited and requires hardware support which rules out most mobile devices. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic global illumination with voxel cone tracing decreases the computational power needed

Voxel cone tracing is a similar algorithm to ray tracing, but uses thick rays instead of pixel thin rays to be able vastly decrease the amount of computational power needed. See More

Top Con

C++ - oriented development cycle: slow turn-around times

The Unreal Editor is the main place to do stuff (of course), so if someone wants to do a lot of C++ stuff, the compilation and linking turn-around times can be painful. Still they probably are quite fast in comparison to the provided featureset.. Still ,they are far from optimal. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use animation blueprints

Unreal Engine 4 is one of the best game engines. It is super easy. It dosent require any use of coding due to Animation Blueprints See More

Top Con

Poor documentation

Most of the "documentation" for code is actually just automatically generated from the source. If you're interested in knowing how things are supposed to work, you must either go to their answers site or pay for UDN. Often their examples won't even compile, since they were written for now outdated versions. See More

Top Pro

Spectacular lighting visuals

Top Con

Royalty based

5% of profits will go to Unreal after $3000 earned in a quarter. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform editor and export

This engine exports for a big range of platforms including Linux. The editor can be run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux (Early Access). See More

Top Con

They spend more time adding features than fixing existing ones

Top Pro

Active community

Forums have many active and friendly members that are quick to respond and help out. Even staff is very active on forums. See More

Top Con

C# not natively supported

UE4 does not support C# natively, but this can be achieved through MonoUE, although it requires using the MonoUE fork instead of UE itself. See More

Top Pro

AAA Ready

This is ready to make the next AAA game. See More

Top Con

Poor source control support

Merge tool is not working. See More

Top Pro

Fast compilation for quick iteration

Recompiling an entire game to test a small change takes up a lot of time. UE4 quickly compiles in seconds instead of minutes improving iteration time by an order of magnitude. See More

Top Con

Poor quality assurance on their releases

After each release they almost immediately release a hotfix. And another one. And another one. See More

Top Pro

Quick release-cycle

New feature releases can be commonly expected about once a month. See More

Top Con

Unreal Engine crashes a lot if you don't have the required system requirements

Top Pro

Professional feature set for all aspects of game development

Almost everything a game developer wants has a deep and sophisticated tool waiting for them in UE4. No external plugins are needed to make powerful materials, FX, terrain, cinematics, gameplay logic, AI, animation graphs, post process effects, lighting etc. See More

Top Con

Sparse Resources for C++

C++ happens to be the main suite for Unreal, yet the documentation is very, very sparse. See More

Top Pro

Proven track record

Top Con

Extremely poorly designed

The code is a mess. Everything is connected, a single Actor is 1500 bytes, because it contains a million things that Epic once needed in a game. Inheritance for AActor: AActor > UObject > UObjectBaseUtility > UObjectBase See More

Top Pro

No coding experience needed

Top Con

Difficult for Mac users

If you're installing it on Mac, you simply download Epic games launcher and watch it download nothing endlessly. See More

Top Con

Tutorials do not go in-depth enough

The blueprint tutorial just teaches how to turn on a light when you press f. See More

Top Con

Proprietary

Top Con

Not available on Linux

Top Con

No Terrain Editor included

Top Con

Bad support

The epic games team only assists with billing and account issues, not bugs. See More

Top Con

Terrible physics

Top Con

Frequent crashes

Often the editor crashes interrupting your work. See More

Top Con

Poor error messages

Top Con

Rarely works

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

Languages:C++, Blueprints (Visual Scripting)

Desktop targets:Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, SteamOs, HTML5

Mobile targets:iOS, Android

The app contains tools for coding, sprite editing, map editing, sfx and music editing. See More

824 181

score 24 · Answer 20

TIC-80

Top Pro

All tools in one place

Top Pro

Free

Free version already includes most features but a paid version is available. See More

Top Pro

Retro-styled and restricted environment

Pixelated Software with a good retro style. See More

Top Pro

Many Scripting languages' supported

Use awesome scripting languages like: Lua, Wren, Moonscript, JS, Ruby, etc. See More

Top Pro

Export

Exports easily to Windows, Windows-XP, mac, Linux and HTML. See More

Top Pro

Noob underdog

You can imagine this engine Shiva Lua scripting language making 2d side scrolling Megaman style games a Bandai trademark. See More

Specs

Platforms:Web, Windows, Linux, Mac, Android

Languages:Lua, JavaScript, Moonscript, Fennel, Wren

3D:No