What is the best alternative to MelonJS?

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score 22 · Answer 1

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

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22 8

score 35 · Answer 2

Crafty.js

Top Pro

Eventbinding

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

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

Javascript

Top Pro

Modular

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

Specs

Languages:Javascript

35 4

score 89 · Answer 3

Phaser

Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

Phaser keeps things simple and as such is easy to use by beginners. See More

Top Con

Missing accessibility features

While not a big issue, it may be a dealbreaker for some. See More

Top Pro

1000s of examples

Thousands of example are on the Phaser website, which show everything you could want to do with Phaser. See More

Top Con

Poor code structure

There's little in terms of cohesiveness in classes, methods or patterns. See More

Top Pro

Supports WebGL with canvas fallback

If WebGL is unavailable, Phaser automatically switches to HTML5 canvas. See More

Top Pro

Targets mobile browsers

Built specifically for mobile web browsers. See More

Specs

Platforms:Web

Price:Free

Scripting language:Javascript, Typescript, ES6 Ecmascript

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89 15

score 47 · Answer 4

Pixi.js

Top Pro

Supports WebGL w/ canvas fallback

Pixi is a WebGL renderer, but can fall back to canvas if WebGL is not supported or turned off. See More

Top Con

Not a complete solution

Pixi only provides the renderer. See More

Top Pro

Will be familiar to ActionScript developers

Pixi.js uses a code structure that's very similar to ActionScript. See More

47 12

score 566 · Answer 5

Construct 2

Top Pro

Quick to pick up

Construct 2 is fast to pick up, get into, and belt out some pretty impressive games in a relatively small amount of time. Seems to be built for people who don't have a lot of programming skills, but want to make great games. See More

Top Con

Poor mobile performance

Construct 2 is focused on Javascript. Javascript isn't as fast as native code, which results in poor performance on mobile. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity - it is made for everybody to use and love

Construct 2 is a tool for not just programmers, but artists as well. You can create a game with only visual coding, which is easy to learn and doesn't require any previous programming knowledge. You can focus on making your game better instead of just coding. It has some limitations of course, but it's definitely worth it. See More

Top Con

Free version is severely limited

Although a free version of the engine is available, it lacks features that are essential to creating a high quality product. See More

Top Pro

Little programming knowledge needed

Using Construct 2 requires very little programming knowledge because it's all drag'n'drop, intuitive, visual and event-driven instead of code-only. See More

Top Con

The editor is Windows only

Although Construct 2 is able to export projects to Windows, OS X and Linux, the program itself currently only runs on Windows. See More

Top Pro

Built-in physics system

Thanks to the great power of Erin Catto's Box2D, Construct 2 is able to make physics games which are similar to Cut the Rope and Angry Birds. See More

Top Con

HTML5 is very dependent on browser performance

Theoretically all browsers should run HTML5 pretty much the same way, but thats not always the case. Something that worked fine on Chrome, for instance, might malfunction on Firefox (or vice versa). And there's nothing the devs of Construct 2 can really do about it, but to hope next Firefox update might fix it. Internet Explorer is not even recommended. Add to that the fact that exporting to mobile or desktops rely on these sort of stripped down versions of web browsers (Node webkit, Crosswalk, Ejecta) that you pack with your game, and you can have a real headache if you're trying to make your game work properly through multiple platforms. See More

Top Pro

Cordova support

You can use Cordova plugins from the community See More

Top Con

Does not export to native mobile code

Construct 2 builds to HTML 5 only, which can cause performance issues on mobile devices depending on the HTML5 engine that the OS is using since that will be the biggest bottleneck. Even though it's not really the engine's fault, it still is at a disadvantage compared to native game engines. See More

Top Pro

In-depth event system

Construct 2's event system allows for deep, detailed control over all aspects of your game. You aren't limited to just a few options. Rather, Scirra has thought of nearly everything in advance with access to any desired parameter of any object all paired with simple and intuitive ways to interact with them. Your events can be organized with event sheets (that can be included in other sheets), event groups, sub-events, loops, and functions that make the coding portion of your game as efficient as possible. You don't need any programming knowledge, but if you do have some, you'll feel right at home with the freedom C2 offers. See More

Top Con

Discontinued as of July 2021, in favor of Construct 3

Construct 2 licenses cannot be bought anymore since July 2020, and support has ended on July 1st 2021 with the release of the final r280 version (see here). Existing customers can still use the game engine, but it will no longer be updated. See More

Top Pro

Supportive community

Construct 2 has a supportive community. Their forums have tens of thousands of topics with ten times more posts. The core maintainers are very helpful and friendly and often reply to questions or issues that may be discussed in the forums. See More

Top Con

Clickteam Fusion Clone

This is a copy of the Clickteam softwares See More

Top Pro

Easy to create particles and animations

With spriter file implementation and internal animation editor Construct 2 provides an easy way of creating particles and animations. See More

Top Con

Dependency on 3rd parties for all exports

Unless you are creating a game strictly for browser/HTML5 usage, exporting to desktop or mobile is risky, as Scirra have no control over your final export quality. Since desktop uses NodeWebkit and mobile is Crosswalk, Phonegap or CocoonJS there is no guarantee that your final export performance and quality will be up to scratch for pro level 2d games. These 3rd party "browser wrappers" are very prone to breaking and introducing lag and bugs that can't be controlled from Scirra's side. See More

Top Pro

Free (feature limited) version available

A free version of Construct 2 is available. It's not time restricted in any way, but is feature limited. See More

Top Con

HTML5 Only is extremely limiting

If the software could export natively to mobile devices and PC/Mac/Linux it would be extremely powerful. The developer's choice of sticking to only HTML5 has created a bottleneck for anyone wanting to develop with this software. See More

Top Pro

Active plugin ecosystem

Construct 2 has an active plugin ecosystem providing behaviors and features that smooth the workflow for certain game types. See More

Top Con

Tilemap object could be better

C2 requires that there's a tilemap objects for each tilemap layer meaning each tilemap object has to be updated when modifying any layer. This could be simplified by adding layer support for tilemap objects. See More

Top Pro

Export control for all major platforms

All platform exporters are part of the subscription. There are no additional fees and new exporters are added quickly and maintained well. Currently, 15 platforms are supported, including HMTL 5, iOS, Android, Windows, Chrome Store, PhoneGap and Scirra. See More

Top Con

Buggy

Experience regular crashes and inexplicable project file corruption. See More

Top Pro

Built in behaviors make development workflows very efficient

Behaviors add pre-packaged functionality to object types. See More

Top Con

Unreliable access to online resources

Unreliable access to online resources such as online tutorials and forums, plus extremely outdated offline manual. See More

Top Pro

Very fast preview

In Construct 2 you can preview your games instantly at any time. There’s no need to wait for compiling or other time consuming processes. See More

Top Pro

Available on Steam

You can also download Construct 2 on Steam. See More

Top Pro

One-off cost

It's a one off cost for Construct 2 and all updates to the Construct 2 editor are free for life. See More

Top Pro

Supports camera, microphone, speech recognition and synthesis

Can use cameras in PCs and on mobiles. You can use the synthesis that can recognize your speech or you can write something and it can talk for you. See More

Top Pro

Interface similar to that of MS office

This engine provides an intuitive workflow for people that are used to the Windows environment. See More

Top Pro

Runs great on mobile

Performs well on most devices and browsers. See More

Top Pro

Rapid development

After using a few quick tutorials you can quickly catch on to the event system this program uses and quickly be able to build any type of 2D game you want. You can download a few sprites from google and put together a working level of Mega Man with character movement / animation / enemies / collision detection / scoring / Tile map and AI within about 2 hours. The built in behaviors are incredible. It's amazing how Construct can simplify the most redundant tasks in game development. See More

Top Pro

Allow server-less multiplayer game creation

Construct 2 uses WebRTC technology to support it's multiplayer functionality. The nature of the technology allows peer-to-peer connection which does not require game developer to create server side architecture to allow communication between games. See More

Top Pro

Supportive devs

The developers are always available to help. See More

Top Pro

Built-in animation/image editor

Basic sprites and tiles of 2D games can be made with engine's built-in tools. See More

Top Pro

Built-in pathfinding

Has built-in solutions for pathfinding. See More

Top Pro

Built-in tilemap object

The tilemap object allows tile-based games to be designed more easily. The object's tilemap can also be edited in the layout view using the tilemap bar. See More

Specs

License:Proprietary

Languages:JavaScript (engine)

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

Mobile targets:Android 4.0+, iOS 8.0+

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566 150

score 263 · Answer 6

Stencyl

Top Pro

Haxe scripting available for advanced users

Power users can also write code in Haxe (similar to Actionscript 3) to create their own custom classes and extend the engine. See More

Top Con

Not a powerful engine

Should be used for basic games only. See More

Top Pro

No coding required, great drag & drop interface

Visual scripting in Stencyl is based on the MIT Scratch project, which was designed to teach programming. Script elements fit together like puzzle pieces, ensuring that data and function types cannot be mismatched. See More

Top Con

Only available via subscription

There should be an option to buy it outright, especially considering it is written by a one man team....this is not exactly an Adobe level enterprise with shareholders, so there is no excuse! See More

Top Pro

Cross-Platform

Publish iOS, Android, Flash, Windows and Mac games without code. See More

Top Con

Slow release cycle

Top Pro

It's a NO-CODE Program, you can add logic without code

Top Con

Updated

It needs much to improve for mobile games, it was left in the era of Flash games. In Android you can not even put the native keyboard, you can not access things like native camera, GPS or native text input. See More

Top Pro

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl 3.x See More

Top Con

Tile system is somewhat inflexible

Top Pro

Great performance on every platform

Stencyl exports your games to native code so they have great performance on every platform. See More

Specs

License:Proprietary (editor), MIT (engine)

Languages:Java (editor), Haxe (engine)

Dev platforms:Windows 7+, Macintosh 10.14+, Linux

Desktop targets:Windows 7+, Macintosh 10.14+, Linux

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263 37

score 30 · Answer 7

Construct 3

Top Pro

Runs in the browser

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

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 345 · Answer 8

Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator

Top Pro

A proven engine for mobile development

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

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

License:MIT

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

Dev platforms:Windows; macOS

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

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345 61

score 173 · Answer 9

Unity

Top Pro

Great community support

Unity is bolstered by a huge, helpful community via its official forums, wiki, Unity Answers, and Unity Asset Store; plus the most-subscribed subreddit of any game engine. See More

Top Con

No native editor for Linux

Though it builds for Linux, the Unity Editor runs only on Windows and Mac. Some users have successfully run the Windows version on Linux via Wine. See More

Top Pro

OUYA support

Top Pro

Over 20 platforms

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

Well structured

Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually do not read the docs, like the one that describes orders of execution, 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 example It is not uncommon 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 example to never read this doc. See More

Top Pro

Very optimized

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

Flexibility is provided by a strong component programming model

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 Pro

Powerful standard shaders

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

Can create custom forms and tools

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 Pro

Lots of resources to learn from

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

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. This allows it to be more powerful than other, simpler drag-and-drop engines such as Game Maker Studio, although it can take a bit more experience to learn the workflow. See More

Top Pro

As of Unity 5 all engine features are free for everyone

As long as the company makes $100k or less, Unity's free version can be used to release games without purchasing the pro version. See More

Top Pro

Supports 2D and 3D

With Unity knowledge of just one engine is needed to be able to create both 2D and 3D games. See More

Top Pro

Great community

Great Community support through Forums and Unity Answers. See More

Top Pro

Provides access to a huge list of assets through Asset Store

There's an Asset Store, providing free and paid assets (including components). It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection. See More

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173 38

score 2148 · Answer 10

Godot

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

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

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

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

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

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++

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2148 325

score 824 · Answer 11

Unreal Engine 4

Top Pro

A visual scripting system for non-coders enables quick prototyping

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

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

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824 181

score 479 · Answer 12

Elm

Top Pro

No run-time exceptions

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests. See More

Top Con

Lack of typeclasses

Elm doesn't have typeclasses which means some code needs to be duplicated. A fix in a function that needs typeclasses means all of the duplicates need to be fixed too. See More

Top Pro

Inferred static typing

ML static typing is great because it's always there, you just choose how explicit you want to be and how much you want the compiler to do. See More

Top Con

limited js interop

only one way ports are available as a crude js FFI. This means you can only call functions both directions but will not get a result. See More

Top Pro

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

In no other language you can refactor so easy without any worries, since the compiler will guide you through. It is like TDD but than compiler-error driven. See More

Top Con

Harder to get buy-in from devs and mgmt

It's a total divergence from what most people are used to in the JS ecosystem. The change in syntax can be scary, the change in approaching problems can be scary. The fact that it's not backed by FANG can be scary. The fact that it's not v1.0 can be scary. The governance model and the deliberately slow release cadence can be scary. There are a couple harsh medium articles, hackernews/reddit posts out there made by people with an ax to grind that can be scary if you don't have a better picture of the Elm community, the tradeoffs that have been made, or the benefits to be had over other options. None of these are good reasons to write off further investigation of a great tech, but it happens. See More

Top Pro

Designed around high-level front-end development

As Elm was designed as a front-end langauge, it has out of the box support for things like DOM-element creation, letting programmers focus on their application logic, rather than implementation details specific to the web. See More

Top Con

Code Repetition

Because of the lack of genericness Elm needs a lot of code to be repeated. There are 130+ implementations of map in elms core libraries. See More

Top Pro

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

You can try to apply some functional programming ideas in other languages that have an imperative basis, but you haven't seen the real power unless you tried it in the environment of purely functional programming. Elm is a simple language with great learning resources and easy graphical output, which makes it easy to explore the power of functional programming. Plus programming in Elm is very readable. See More

Top Con

Features get removed without warning

Often features that are deemed to be misused by the community like infix operators get removed without much of a warning. See More

Top Pro

Good tooling

All major editors have great support. With Atom for example, Elm plugins are available for linting, formatting, make/compiler support and Elmjutsu will simply overflow you with super useful functions, like navigate to referenced definition and show expression type. See More

Top Con

Community harsh if criticised

If one even dares to start a discussion about a feature on elms slack, discord, subreddit or github one will be aggressively shut down often argueing that one should use purescript instead See More

Top Pro

Batteries included

The Elm Architecture means you don't need to spend valuable time and effort choosing the right frameworks, state management libraries, or build tooling. It's all built in. See More

Top Con

Poor Windows support

Few if any of Elm's core contributors are Windows users and breaking bugs are sometimes left for weeks or months. See More

Top Pro

Static module system

Elm uses easy to use modules. Use: import List import List as L import List exposing (..) import List exposing ( map, foldl ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(..) ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(Just) ) Creation: module MyModule exposing (foo, bar) See More

Top Con

Good for beginners not good for experts

Development in elm is quite nice until you need some more advanced features. These however are actively discontinued and removed because elm wants to establish a "single way of doing things" philosophy See More

Top Pro

Missing syntactic sugar

Easy to learn, most functions have only one way, not 5 alternatives where you must study where to best use what. See More

Top Con

Updates break existing code often

The last few updates of elm broke existing code in major ways. See More

Top Pro

Growing community

Top Con

Adds an additional layer of abstraction

Some users claim that Elm adds an additional layer of abstraction, meaning that it is one more hurdle between the brain and the product. See More

Top Pro

Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping

Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included. See More

Top Con

Functional programming itself has quite a steep learning curve

Functional programming can be quite difficult to get your head around. It takes time to unlearn object orientational habits. See More

Top Pro

Easy to code review

The lack of side-effects and simple, consistent language semantics make it easy to quickly review incoming changes. See More

Top Con

No Genericness in the future

Currently there is no code genericness like typeclasses possible, it has been officially stated that this will never change. See More

Top Pro

Higher confidence in code correctness and quality

Pure functions, immutable data structures, amazing compiler, clean and homologous syntax used for HTML, logic, and optionally to replace CSS, elimination of entire classes of bugs so you don't even need most unit tests. These factors lead to better code, better programs, higher confidence, and ultimately, more satisfaction. See More

Top Con

Not database-friendly

It is lots of work to make a server or database your "one source of truth", as Elm makes you write endless JSON parse boilerplate to talk to the server. See More

Top Pro

Not quite Haskell semantics

Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible. See More

Top Con

No Syntactic Sugar

Often you need to write longer and less readable code because there are no alternatives that are more concise. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows Linux Mac Web

Current stable version:0.19.1

GZipped size:23.2 kB

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