What is the best alternative to&#x20;FlatRedBall?

Every property can be animated. See More

68 16

score 1112 · Answer 2

Godot

Top Pro

Integrated animation editor

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

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

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

Fully dedicated 2D engine, no hacks

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

Top Con

Very bad documentation

The documentation is poorly written, and has very few examples of real application and even fewer design guidelines about how to program a game in the engine. Though it has gotten better starting from version 3.0. 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

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

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

Lightweight

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

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

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

Free and open source

Godot is licensed under MIT license. Anyone can grab the source from https://github.com/godotengine/godot, and compile the engine themselves. See More

Top Con

NoAdmob or other AdNetwork support

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

OSX app is a mess

Instead of one contained folder/file with an icon per normal it is a mess of files which is not at all suitable or distributable without further work after every compilation. 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

Hard for a Unity user

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

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 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 Pro

Internationalization of the editor

You can change the language shown in menus. Godot translations: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/godot-engine/godot/ 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 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 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

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

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

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

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

Can Be Installed On Steam

You can easily install Godot via the Steam store. 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

Doesn't need to be installed into the system

Godot is very portable I can download the file from my website then put it on a USB and run it on my other Computer without any troublesome errors about Installing the software See More

Specs

Languages:C++(library) C#, GDscript(like python)

Price:Free

Clean and well-designed API that is easily discoverable. Comes with a simple tool (utiLITI) for editing levels based on .tmx maps. See More

1112 218

score 5 · Answer 3

LITIengine

Top Pro

Easy to use

Top Con

Limited to Desktop

Games made with the engine only run on Windows, Linux and MacOS. There is no support for Android or HTML, yet. See More

Top Pro

Free an open-source

The engine is published under the MIT license and is entirely free to use. See More

Top Pro

Active and helpful community

Has an active forum and discord channel to discuss topics about the engine. See More

Specs

License:MIT License

Languages:Java

Desktop targets:Windows, Linux, MacOS

5 0

score 41 · Answer 4

Duality

Top Pro

Open source

The full source code is available on GitHub, where the framework is actively developed. All of the editor, core and plugin code is written in C#. See More

Top Con

Visual Studio required

To have possibility for scripting you have to download entire Visual Studio and spend 10 GB of free space See More

Top Pro

Great editor

Duality includes a powerful visual editing system that can be used for previewing, integrating, editing and testing game content. See More

Top Con

Requires windows for development

Top Pro

Live reload of code and assets

Top Pro

Very extensible

Because both Core and Editor are completely plugin-based, Duality not only incorporates a clean and modular design, but is also very extensible - even if it wasn't Open Source. In fact, most of the standard editing capabilities comes in form of Editor plugins. See More

Top Pro

Built-in physics and lighting

Top Pro

Friendly to version control systems

It can be configured to serialize all data in a text-based format, which has been structurally optimized for version control systems. See More

Top Pro

Used in commercial projects

It has been used in a production environment without burning the place to the ground. Supposedly artist-proof editor workflow with an API for tailoring the system to fit your team. See More

Specs

Languages:C#

Dev platforms:Windows

Desktop targets:Windows

Games and applications made with Wave Engine must display a splash screen advertising it. No splash-free license option is available. See More

41 17

score 67 · Answer 5

Wave

Top Con

Mandatory splash screen

Top Pro

Extensive learning material

In addition to online API documentation, the Wave Engine team provides tutorials via IndieDB, plus sample projects and "QuickStarters" via GitHub. See More

Top Con

Not many tutorials available

Top Pro

Supports coding in C#, F# and Visual Basic

Wave Engine explicitly supports all three core .Net Platform languages. See More

Top Con

Outdated UI

The UI looks like it is from Windows XP days. A refresh is much needed. See More

Top Pro

Oculus Rift support

The Wave Engine team provides an official, open-source Oculus Rift extension via GitHub. See More

Top Pro

Many components are open source

Several core components and official extensions of the Wave Engine are publicly hosted on GitHub. See More

Specs

Languages:C#; VB; F#

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux

Mobile targets:iOS; Android

Unity3D provides an exhaustive documentation where everything is given a full description supplied by a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions to understand the ins and outs of the engine. In addition there's an ever-growing community that can offer advice to help resolve any situations that may arise. Along with the official Unity resources, there are many high quality (and often free) third party tutorials available. See More

67 29

score 667 · Answer 6

Unity3D

Top Pro

Lots of resources to learn from

Top Con

Very bad terrain

Native terrain creates a lot of draw calls which is bad for performance. See More

Top Pro

Lots of assets can be found in the Asset Store

For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection. See More

Top Con

Garbage collection can't be turned off

Given the use of C#, the memory control is out of the developers control, this can be good, but not controlling memory means that the garbage collector can trigger at any time and ruin performance. See More

Top Pro

Allows for rapid prototyping

Unity's modular system and usability allows for quickly developing a prototype of an idea. It has features like drag & drop editing, shaders, animation and other systems already in place to allow diving right into developing a game. See More

Top Con

Hard to maintain projects due to vendor lock

Unity3D is proprietary, closed source game engine. Unity asks money for features like basic version control support, etc. It is impossible to migrate a game from Unity3D in case performance does not satisfy growing requirements of a project. See More

Top Pro

Easy learning curve

The way the editor is structured, by setting scripts on objects, and the use of a high-level language, C#, makes it easy to learn. See More

Top Con

Very self-centered engine

Unity3D uses very unique approach for doing things. Most of the knowledge acquired while using it, would be completely non transferable to other engines. Advanced Unity3D programming is really dealing with Unity3D bugs, and finding loopholes around engine issues - nothing to do with graphics, etc. Skills which would be valuable with other engines. See More

Top Pro

Very popular

Unity is a proven game engine. It is used by a wide range of developers - from small indies to triple-A companies such as Microsoft, Paradox, Square Enix and Sega. See More

Top Con

Weak memory management

.Net libraries are slowing it down, memory safety is compromised, classes have to be implemented to manage objects in memory, like object pooling. See More

Top Pro

Great community

Great Community support through the Forums and Unity Answers. See More

Top Con

Asset store is required to replace engine functionality

You will need to, for example, buy an input manager asset off their asset store in order to replace their own terrible inaccessible input manager. See More

Top Pro

Great editor

The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time as well as progress gameplay frame by frame. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection. See More

Top Con

Dark UI theme not available in the free version

Dark theme, which is a must for prolonged work without eye strain, is only available with one of the paid monthly plans. See More

Top Pro

Works with 3rd party IDEs

You can use any C# IDE for it, but the ones tested which have Unity integration are: Microsoft Visual Studio MonoDevelop Visual Studio Code (much faster than VS, but a bit harder to set up for Unity development) JetBrains Rider (very fast, has lots of functionality and best Unity integration, but it is not free) See More

Top Con

Adds too many features without fixing earlier issues, rapidly increasing number of bugs that will never get fixed

Unity continues to add many new features without fixing earlier issues. Unity is either understaffed, overambitious, or both, resulting in a continual increase of problems and degraded experience across a number of platforms. Many bugs are reported daily and never get addressed, and there are many bugs from previous versions that are never looked at or fixed. See More

Top Pro

Can be used for free

As long as the development company makes $100k or less, it can use the free version of Unity to release games. See More

Top Con

Moderators on forums are sometimes arrogant

Top Pro

Over 20 platforms

Unity offers over 20 platforms for publishing including mobile, console, web, VR, and more. See More

Top Con

Bad batching support

Draw Call Batching is done automatically and does not include Skinned Renderers (eg. characters). Also for dynamic batching, meshes need to have less than 900 vertices. See More

Top Pro

Versatile

Not tailored for specific types of games (like Unreal...), so it won't get in your way if you want to make something unique. See More

Top Con

Increasing number of bugs

With each new version things may stop working ,for example with Android, some bugs are never getting fixed, like the freeze bug with adb. See More

Top Pro

Has a great animation system

Unity provides a great state machine animation system called Mechanim allowing to separate animation from the model and assign the same animoations to different models. See More

Top Con

Encourages bad coding practices

A lot of Unity code feels like a hacked blur of arguable coding practices. C# and .Net usage in Unity is questionable. A lot of the API is done in "C Style" (public static methods, available at all times), encouraging the use of public fields for everything, a lot of questionable implicit casting. The list goes on. See More

Top Pro

Very optimized

Unity runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards. See More

Top Con

Mobile builds (Android, iOS) take about 18MB at least

Even a Blank Project, Needs 18MB for the APK file (on Android). See More

Top Pro

Powerful standard shaders

The built in standard shader in Unity 5 is incredibly optimized and supports PBS/PBR. See More

Top Con

Bad UI tools

Way of creating UI is uncomfortable and inconvenient. See More

Top Pro

Can create custom forms and tools

Top Con

Asset bundles can be cumbersome

Asset bundles are a way to load external resources that are not packed with the game or application and offered as a separate, optional package. However, they may not be compatible between versions or even platforms (you have to create them separately). Asset bundles need to be loaded and unloaded, avoid concurrent loads from web or cache or a naming collision can happen. You can find workarounds with static objects (load obj files and textures by code), but for animated game objects you are pretty much stuck with this. See More

Top Pro

OUYA support

Top Con

New il2cpp script backend is show stopper to some iOS projects

Il2cpp script backend is required to build arm64 app, but it's still very buggy and not production ready. See More

Top Pro

Flexibility is provided by a strong component programming model

Top Con

Price is very high

Cost is based on Revenue: less than $100K = Free between $100K and 200K = $35 a month per seat greater thank 200K = $125 a month per seat See More

Top Pro

Well structured

Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually dont read the docs, like the one that describe orders of execution (https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ExecutionOrder.html), or specific functions hooks and such. Some like to say it lacks raw power where people who are used to standard optimizations have no problem. For exemple It is not uncomon to encounter users who complain about low FPS but forgot to activate occlusion, flag static elements, activate animations culling, and so on. As for complaints about C#, people who are transitioning from C++ were already bad at C++ before being bad at C#. They often come from the PC world where the sheer power of today's machines is very forgiving compared to the platforms we had to develop for in the 80s~90s. One of their errors is for exemple to never read this doc: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/BestPracticeGuides.html. See More

Top Con

Docs have inconsistent choice of scripting languages

Top Pro

Has awesome plugins

Top Con

Comparatively high learning curve is putting it nicely. Expect to spend days upon days researching basic functionality.

Although C#, JS, and Boo have documentation available online, it can still be difficult to understand the library and Unity's component based system. See More

Top Pro

Free for mobile development

Unity allows free mobile development. There are some limitations. See More

Top Con

Waisted resources

Slow, buggy, expensive and 1000 other problems. See More

Top Con

Bad model importing

Top Con

Bad input

Their input manager cannot be accessed via code. If you want to update controls at runtime (which any PC game should be able to do), you'll have to roll your own. Except joysticks are also not available via code. See More

Top Con

Bad raycasts

Specs

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux;

Mobile targets:Windows Phone; iOS; Android; BlackBerry 10; Tizen

Console targets:Xbox 360; Xbox One; Wii U; PlayStation 3; PlayStation 4; PlayStation Vita; Nintendo Switch; Nintendo 3DS

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

667 245

score 216 · Answer 7

Orx

Top Pro

Friendly community

Top Con

No network support

Top Pro

High performance

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

Top Pro

Powerful config system

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

Top Pro

Automatic hot-loading of resources

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

Top Pro

Good animation engine

Includes a chaining graph & custom animation events for synchronization. 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

Viewport scheme allowing multiple views

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

Top Pro

Flexible clock system

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

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

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

Flexible and simple FX

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

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

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

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

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

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

Specs

License:zlib

Price:Free

Languages:C, C++, Objective C

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux

UDK has an extremely large toolset that allows creating almost anything without having to use a 3rd party tool or plugin. See More

216 14

score 26 · Answer 8

UDK

Top Con

Superseded by Unreal Engine 4

Top Pro

Large toolset

Top Con

DevKit only runs on Windows

Even though UDK can deploy games to run on multiple platforms, including Mac, it does not feature support for development on Mac. See More

Top Pro

Triple A track record

UDK is an engine used by many big name companies for popular games such as the Gears of War series. See More

Top Con

Limits games to FPS

UDK was originally developed for the FPS, "Unreal Tournament", and it certainly shows. While UDK is a very powerful engine, it takes quite a bit of work to make it do something other than an FPS. See More

Specs

Languages:C++; C#; UnrealScript; Cg

Dev platforms:Windows

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX

Mobile targets:iOS

Easy to learn, based on Entities and Components, the later being class-like objects that entities inherit. See More

26 23

score 21 · Answer 9

Crafty.js

Top Pro

Eventbinding

Top Con

No IDE

If you like having some huge GUI akin to Gamemaker, Unreal, Unity, etc, Crafty is not for you. See More

Top Pro

Modular

Has open function binding systems, allowing easy creation of custom components. See More

Top Pro

Javascript

Specs

Languages:Javascript

21 3

score 35 · Answer 10

Flixel

Top Con

Development has stopped

Seems like development for Flixel has stopped. The last commit on all of the branches of it's Github repository are from 2011. See More

Top Pro

Many ports available

Ports are available for Objective C, C# (XNA), HaXe and Monkey X. See More

Top Con

Poor performance on mobile

Top Pro

Built-in pathfinding and following

Pathfinding just means figuring out how to (or if you can) get from A to B. FlxTilemap has a function FlxTilemap.findPath() which returns a FlxPath object, which is just a collection of "nodes", or FlxPoint objects. See More

Top Pro

Camera system for split screen

Create effects like "split screen" views, or "picture in picture" style displays, or even mini-maps with FlxCamera. Each camera is an independent display object, with its own zoom, color tint, rotation, and scaling values. See More

Top Pro

Record and play back replays

Replays are essentially a list of what keyboard keys were pressed, and what mouse inputs were given, during a specific time frame. Because Flixel is largely deterministic, you can use that information to recreate a gameplay session that someone else recorded, as long as you have the same SWF. See More

Top Pro

Basic features provide a solid foundation

Display thousands of moving objects Basic collisions between objects Group objects together for simplicity Easily generate and emit particles Create game levels using tilemaps Text display, save games, scrolling Mouse & keyboard input Math & color utilities See More

Top Pro

Flixel Power Tools extend the functionality

Flixel Power Tools provide a set of classes and APIs that provide more functionality. See More

Top Pro

Used to create Canabalt, game that started endless runner genre

Specs

Languages:ActionScript 3

Desktop targets:none

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

35 6

score 341 · Answer 11

GDevelop

Top Pro

Free and open-source

Top Con

Still needs more tutorials

It has not bad documentation and forum but still needs more tutorials (although there are some good examples to learn from). See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

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

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

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

Behaviours 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

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

Support both native and HTML5 games (web and mobile development)

GDevelop is able to create HTML5 games that can run on web browsers and be exported to iOS and Android using solutions like Intel XDK or Cocoon.JS. GDevelop is also one of the only friendly game creator that is able to make native games for Windows and Linux, which are blazing fast and allow to make advanced games with lots of objects, effects and very large levels. 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

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 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 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 Pro

Multilanguage support

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

Top Pro

Online version available, compatible with iOS and Android

Thanks to its open source nature, GDevApp.com was built over the GDevelop engine. GDevApp.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 GDevApp and export it to open it inside GDevelop. See More

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Web

Desktop targets:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, Web

Since you don't have access to the code, you can't make changes to the SDK. You even have to implement workarounds on issues that have long been reported, but never fixed. See More

341 35

score 247 · Answer 12

Corona SDK

Top Pro

Very simple to use

Top Con

Closed source

Top Pro

Free

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

Top Con

Free, but not completely

Such important plugins like AdMob cost $300 per year! 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 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

Lua syntax

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

Top Pro

Good documentation and lots of tutorials

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

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

Content scaling

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

Well supported

Specs

Price:Free; $99/yr to remove splash screen

Languages:Lua

Dev platforms:Windows; Macintosh

Desktop targets:Windows; Macintosh

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

247 44

score 78 · Answer 13

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

It's an open engine

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

Specs

Languages:JavaScript

Dev platforms:Windows, macOS

Desktop targets:Windows, macOS, Web

Mobile targets:Android, iOS

Not a lot of documentation is available. See More

78 19

score 44 · Answer 14

HaxePunk

Top Con

Messy / fragmented documentation

Top Pro

Joystick and multi-touch support

Useful for mobile games and soon consoles (OpenFL has a console port in the works). See More

Top Con

Small comunity

It’s a small but growing community. See More

Top Pro

Crossplatform testing/releasing

HaxePunk uses OpenFL which means you can compile to just about every device. A lot of the rendering code has been optimized so if you use HaxePunk’s graphic classes you are pretty much ready to deploy on any target. See More

Top Pro

Generic entity system

A generic Entity system that only uses what you “attach” to it. If you need collision masks they are available but if an entity doesn’t need to collide with anything then simply don’t add a mask. Same goes for graphics. See More

Top Pro

Written in Haxe instead of AS3

This comes with blazing fast compile times, proper static typing, multiple output targets, and a powerful macro system. See More

Top Pro

Multiple collision masks

HaxePunk has added several collision masks beyond what FlashPunk had including a grid with slope values, circles, and polygons. This is in addition to FlashPunk’s tile grid and hitbox. See More

Top Pro

Tweens

Tweens are available just like they are in FlashPunk. If you need to interpolate values for sounds, movement, etc… it’s probably already available as a tween. There is also a VarTween that lets you interpolate any value you want. See More

Specs

Languages:Haxe

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux

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

44 13

score 325 · Answer 15

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

The community seems juvenile

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

Uses hg to version-control, not git

If the source codes were controlled by git, it would be more convenient for more programmers to contribute to Love2d. Using hg on bitbucket resulted in loss of tons of users. 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

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

Cross-platform

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

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 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 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 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

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 Pro

Many tutorials on the internet

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

Top Pro

Cute name

So much love. 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

Specs

License:zlib / libpng

Languages:Lua, C++

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

Desktop targets:Windows, OSX, Linux, HTML5 ( unofficially )

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

325 71

score 298 · Answer 16

Clickteam Fusion 2.5

Top Pro

Export native runtime for all platforms

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

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

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

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 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

Free version

A free version is available for download here. 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

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

No native animator with curves, etc

Top Pro

Permissive runtime license agreement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exporters are separate purchases, and they are not cheap

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

No console/Linux exporters

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

Top Pro

Well-optimized

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

Top Con

Simpler than Scratch

Fusion 2.5 is more Simpler than MIT'S Scratch! 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

The free edition is severely limited

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 Pro

Exports native mobile code, making great performance games

Top Pro

Great for non-game apps, such as tools, utilities, multimedia projects, etc.

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:(Visual Editor)

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac

Desktop targets:Windows, Mac

AppGameKit supports instant testing on all connected devices. With the push of a button you can run your game on any device connected to the development machine. See More

298 85

score 202 · Answer 17

AppGameKit 2.0

Top Pro

Instant testing on multiple devices at once

Top Con

Terrible scripting language

MS Basic from the 70's has more features. Procedural, no OO, inheritance, basic user defined types with overloading. Nothing. It even has GOSUB. See More

Top Pro

HTML5 support

The AppGameKit Basic can now export to HTML5. See More

Top Con

BASIC language

Even though it supports C++, it's mostly C++ mapped to BASIC without OOP. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Supports developing games for Android, iOS, PC, Mac, Linux and now HTML5. See More

Top Con

Can almost only do trivial games

The editor is rather limited, not fully polished, and 3D is missing some key functionalities (3D is work in progress). See More

Top Pro

Easy basic programming

Program in tier 1 BASIC programming for every 3D game need. See More

Top Con

$80 even if your game doesn't fly

Top Pro

Raspberry Pi free version available

A Raspberry Pi version is available and free. Users just need to register with the developer and then they can download. See More

Top Con

No builtin game mechanics, events, inventory.

Top Pro

Very fast compilation

It is a compilation based language, but the compilation is very fast. A project of about 1800 lines of code, for example, can compile almost instantly. (That's because it does not compile, it's an interpreter) See More

Top Con

Editor code completion is pretty bad

Top Pro

You only need to to pay for the license only

There is no charge for upgrades, or for extra platforms (the HTML5 version just appeared in the latest version), there are no subscription fees or other usage charges. If you publish onto either Apple or Google's stores you will have to pay their costs, of course, but the makers of AGK do not take a cut of this themselves. See More

Top Con

Pros on Slant are written by AGK marketing guys

Top Pro

Support

Informed, timely and intelligent feedback from the AGK forum. See More

Top Pro

Fast development

There are plenty of functions which facilitate development and deployment. For example, the AGK player immediately plays the updated bytecode on Android devices then the online site helps with building an APK file for Google Play Store in minutes. See More

Top Pro

Uses a powerful scripting language built for game development

Software produced with the App Game Kit is written in a language called AGK Script. This language has powerful inbuild commands including commands for 2D graphics, physics and networking. The commands make use of the platforms' native functions to improve performance. They are also designed to enhance code readability. The AGK Script commands have extensive online documentation. See More

Top Pro

C++ and Basic, you have the choice.

It runs fast with BASIC but if you want more you can use C++, it's also easy to use. See More

Top Pro

Can be used for advanced games programming in C++

Libraries which provide the same functionality are available for the five platforms, so you can code in C++ See More

Top Pro

Comes with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

AGK comes with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on the Code::Blocks IDE for writing AGK scripts. A key feature of the IDE is its ability to broadcast compiled programs to other devices for testing. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

Every function is fully documented with examples and exercises. The Tutorial PDF is a full Introduction to 3D game programming with integrated references to every functionality and its most important usecases. The documentation is regulary updated. See More

Top Pro

Plugin support for Windows

Plug-ins can now be added to the Windows platform. Create your own Tier BASIC commands and call them using the AppGameKit Basic script language style. See More

Top Pro

Performance

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux

Desktop targets:Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5

Mobile targets:iOS, Android

3D:Yes

Lots of references, tutorials and open source code to learn from. See More

202 66

score 491 · Answer 18

libGDX

Top Pro

Lots of resources to learn from

Top Con

Not starter friendly

Even default applications fail to load in Android. It doesn't have any documentation on errors either. See More

Top Pro

Great performance across devices

While it may not always have the best performance for a particular device or system, it's one of the few engines which consistently performs very well across different platforms. See More

Top Con

Documentation could be better

Other than a brief installation / getting started overview, libGDX's documentation consists of an official wiki with several incomplete pages, and automated Javadocs. The community recognizes these shortcomings, and new users are encouraged to ask for help. See More

Top Pro

Allows you to migrate from 2D to 3D within same framework

LibGDX supports both 2D and 3D game development. Allowing developers to migrate from 2D to 3D with ease without having to switch the engine they are using or having to learn a new API. See More

Top Con

The project slowed down in development

The number of active developers has decreased, many open issues and pull requests. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't force a specific design

Unlike some engines, which only allow you to make your game in a few specific ways, libGDX allows you to design any type of game you wish as it is extremely customisable. See More

Top Con

Build system is clunky

LibGDX uses Gradle, which is very demanding of memory and makes IDEs freeze on anything if your computer is not powerful enough. See More

Top Pro

Active and helpful community

The libGDX community, in the official libGDX forum is extremely helpful and approachable for any kind of question regardless of the its quality or difficulty. The forums themselves are a very helpful resource for any issue or guide simply by searching past posts in there. In addition to the forums, there's also the official #libgdx IRC channel on Freenode. See More

Top Con

Does not create compiled code

LibGDX runs entirely on Java and does not create executable binaries. See More

Top Pro

Uses Box2D

A Java port of the Box2D physics engine is included in libGDX. See More

Top Con

A bit difficult to use

This engine is not well put together. Is made from various free modules each with their own peculiarities. At times it feels you need to learn a couple of libraries rather than just one. Is not an engine for beginners as it requires coding. Lots of coding. You need to be intermediate to advanced in Java to develop in LibGDX. See More

Top Pro

Interfacing with platform specific code

Sometimes it is necessary to access platform specific APIs, e.g., adding advertisement services or leaderboard functionality provided by frameworks. See More

Top Pro

Fantastic UI toolkit (scene2d)

scene2d is a 2D scene graph, scene2d.ui is a UI toolkit on top of that. It enables very complex mobile and desktop UIs. See More

Top Pro

Can use any JVM language

Since it's built with Java and runs on the JVM, any language that compiles to Java bytecode can be used to develop games with libGDX. See More

Top Pro

Free, open source & permissive license

libGDX uses the Apache License 2.0. Not only is libGDX free and open source but also it's license gives you a lot of power over the engine. As long as you provide a copy of the license, give credit, do not hold devs liable and do not use libGDX logo in any engine forks you can do pretty much anything you want. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to customize

Top Pro

Support for 3rd party tools

libGDX has built in support for many 3rd party tools, including (but not limited to) Bullet Physics, Box2DLights and the well-praised Tiled Map Editor. See More

Top Pro

Constantly improved

LibGDX itself is pretty mature, and get updates not quite frequently, but various libraries for it are actively updated. See More

Top Pro

Across platform support

You can write once and run anywhere (Android, IOS, Desktop, Browser) also lately came with lib to deal with VR. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials to get you going

Even though the official documentation might be lacking, there are many tutorials on YouTube for libGDX. See More

Top Pro

Excellent font rendering support

Very good tools for rendering fonts. See More

Top Pro

Similar to the Microsoft XNA framework

Old XNA users may like libGDX since it's API is actually very similar to XNA's. See More

Top Pro

Focusing on object pool patterns, to control memory without pointers

Unlike Unity or other engine, it allows to optimize a language that uses garbage collector when using patterns of objects you can control the use of memory without needing a language like C / C ++, getting the same speed in a more productive language. See More

Top Pro

Kotlin support

It is written in Java so you can easily make games using Kotlin and Ktx project will help you get all advantages of this language. See More

Specs

License:Apache

Languages:Java

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux; HTML5

ct.js is bundled with examples, docs, and easy to follow tutorials. Documentation and tutorials are available in a side panel on every screen. See More

491 145

score 9 · Answer 19

ct.js

Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

Top Con

Tile editing is a chore

No live brushes with automatic corner drawing, no fills or rectangular/linear placement. All tiles should be placed by hand, with a "Shift" key to place multiple tiles at once. This will make you ragequit if you want to make sophisticated RPG scenes :D See More

Top Pro

Skeletal animations with DragonBones support

You can import skeletal sprites and animations from DragonBones, which is also free. Skeletal animations are added to objects through code; developers can listen to marked events in animation, and ct.js automatically associates sounds in a DragonBones project with the game's assets. See More

Top Con

No built-in particle system

Top Pro

Good code editor

The built-in code editor comes with error checking, type checks, code completions accompanied with docs, multiple cursors support, and other modern features. See More

Top Con

Slower than native games

JavaScript and WebGL are fast, but they will always lose in performance if compared to native games, so it may be a bad choice for graphics-heavy games. See More

Top Pro

Open source (MIT)

This means that no one will ever put any features behind a paywall and that you can reliably use ct.js in any projects without worrying about licensing. And you can hack on ct.js! The repo is at https://github.com/ct-js/ct-js See More

Top Pro

Tileset support

ct.js supports tiles in rooms, including collision checks and some extra editor tools, like bulk migration to a new tile layer or shifting by an exact value. See More

Top Pro

WebGL and WebGL2 support

Starting with v1.0.0-next-1, you can now write WebGL games. WebGL support is based on Pixi.js. See More

Top Pro

Modular approach

ct.js has a "Core" library that provides basic drawing functions, room and asset management, and mouse interactions. Any other functions are added to projects as "catmods", or simply modules. These modules can be enabled or disabled in one click, and can inject their code in different game loop stages, e.g. after drawing all the objects, leaving a room, or when a new object is created. See More

Top Pro

Applicable to most genres

ct.js aims to be a general game engine and provides tools in making games of any genre. See More

Top Pro

Dialogue and visual novel system with support for Yarn

A module ct.yarn allows developers to import a YarnSpinner project to create branching, data-driven dialogues and visual novels. An example is also bundled with ct.js. The dialogue tree is made in a separate app, though. See More

Specs

Languages:JavaScript

Desktop targets:Windows, OSX, Linux

Automatically detects changes and updates bitmap cache. Allows to gain even more performance on heavy scenes and runs smoothly on old devices. See More

9 0

score 8 · Answer 20

Blacksmith 2D

Top Pro

Cache as bitmap

Top Con

Small community

The project is young, so the community is extremely small. See More

Top Pro

Most valuable when size matters

All engine code is written in ES6, fully GCC typed, allowing to eliminate all dead code from your app. See More

Top Pro

Advanced scene graph and rendering pipeline

Dirty flag tracks scene changes and avoids unnecessary calculations and context calls. If no changes were made to the scene since last frame, no rendering will be done. Battery efficient. See More

Top Pro

Good performance

According to the tests on the Github page, the performance is better than in Phaser! See More

Top Pro

Good and clear source code

The source code is well commented and easy to understand. See More

Top Pro

Super small build size

Super small build size through dead code elimination. The best for playable ads and Facebook Instant Games. See More

Specs

Desktop targets::Windows; OSX; Linux; HTML5

Mobile targets::iOS; Android; BlackBerry; Desktop; HTML5

Dev platforms::Windows; OSX; Linux

Languages::JavaScript