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DevelopmentGame DevelopmentAndroid

What are the best 3D game engines for Android?

16

Options
Considered

205

User
Recs.

Oct 29, 2023

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

16 Options Considered

Best 3D game engines for Android	Price	Desktop targets	Mobile targets
-- Libgdx	-	Windows; OSX; Linux; HTML5	iOS; Android; BlackBerry; Desktop; HTML5
-- Unreal Engine 4	-	Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, SteamOs, HTML5	iOS, Android
-- Godot	-	-	-
-- Unity 3D	Free+	Windows; OSX; Linux;	Windows Phone; iOS; Android; BlackBerry 10; Tizen
-- ShiVa3D	-	-	-

Libgdx

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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

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 and OpenGL to develop in LibGDX. See More

CommunicativeOkuninushi's Experience

games and business applications See More

Specs

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux; HTML5

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

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

Console targets:-

Top Pro

Constantly improved

Top Con

Java dependency

libGDX is written in Java. While there are ways to build it into native binaries, its intended and supported use is with the JVM, which has performance ramifications. 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 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

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 Pro

Universal framework

Libgdx is suitable for games and business applications. See More

Top Pro

Active, helpful community

The official libGDX forum is a great resource for both technical help and design feedback. There's also an official #libgdx IRC channel on Freenode. See More

Top Pro

Uses Box2D

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

Top Pro

Very easy to customize

Top Pro

Can use any JVM language

Top Pro

Scene2d support

Top Pro

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

Top Pro

Gradle support

Allows easy integration with multiple IDEs, easy dependency management and provides shell support. See More

Top Pro

Great performance

libGDX has been shown to outperform other popular frameworks across multiple platforms. See More

Top Pro

Free & open source

libGDX uses the Apache License 2.0. See More

Top Pro

Lots of resources to learn from

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

Unreal Engine 4

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Top Pro

AAA Ready

This is ready to make the next AAA game. 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

Capuccino 's Experience

Unreal Engine 4 is one of the most open game engines made. You can freely access the source in GitHub once you have a Epic games account, and you can speed up with game development with great resources from them as well. See More

Specs

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

Mobile targets:iOS, Android

Console targets:PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

VR targets:SteamVR/HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, OSVR, , Google VR/Daydream, Samsung Gear VR

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

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

Respirant's Experience

This engine is not exclusively aimed at very visually complex games, but it is also very good for creating some kind of casual arcades. See More

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

No Terrain Editor included

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

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

Free development license, including source code

The engine, including full access to source code, is licensed to developers for 5% royalty on resulting revenue if it exceeds $3000 per quarter. 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

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

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

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

They spend more time adding features than fixing existing ones

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

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

Quick release-cycle

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

Top Con

Royalty based

5% of profits will go to Unreal after $100000 earned. See More

Godot

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

NoAdmob or other AdNetwork support

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

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android

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

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

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

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 Pro

Built-in physics

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

Fully dedicated 2D engine, no hacks

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

Top Pro

Can Be Installed On Steam

You can easily install Godot via the Steam store. 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

Integrated animation editor

Every property can be animated. See More

Top Pro

Can be installed on Steam

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

Top Pro

It has a visual scripting tool

It has a great visual scripting tool. It's a great choice if you don't like to code. See More

Top Pro

Engine is yours

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

User friendly UI for all your team

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unity 3D

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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

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

JovialAdgilisDeda's Experience

Very Easy to learn and use, ideal for beginners See More

Specs

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux;

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

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

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

Top Pro

Can create custom forms and tools

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

Capuccino 's Experience

While it is a great game engine with a tonload of studios using it, Unity is still problematic, as it still uses outdated C# versions, trivial optimizations, and if you're coming from a non game-dev background with regards to best practices, Unity will throw it off the window. 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

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

Great community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Powerful standard shaders

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

Top Con

Very bad terrain

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

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

OUYA support

Top Con

Unity is too bound to its editor

Sadly, without the editor, you can't do much with Unity. You are forced to use the WYSWYG editor even for simple 2D games. 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 Con

C# support in Unity is outdated on version before 2018.x releases

C# in Unity is way outdated compared to the stable runtime released. Unity uses Mono, however, as Mono releases a new version of the runtime when C# iterates a new language change, Unity gets severely outdated. This has been rectified however, on future Unity releases which will feature C# 7.0. See More

Top Pro

Over 20 platforms

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

Very optimized

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

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

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

ShiVa3D

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Top Pro

Streamlined API

Top Con

Outdated

The current version 1.9.2 of ShiVa was released in December 2013. While there is active development on version 2.0, its beta is available only to paid licensees of the current version. See More

SuaveThoas's Experience

This is not a game engine. it is an engine SDK See More

Top Pro

Great performance on mobile

Smaller platform specific executables, native code export, good FPS even for complex scenes. ShiVa has great advanced optimization features, including PVS and LOD, decreasing number of drawcalls even in complex level. Platform specific profiles allow developers to customize size and compression level for textures and test those settings directly in editor. Other engine features, like lightning baking, mesh combining and GPU skinning will boost performance too. See More

Top Con

ShiVa 2.0 has been worked on for nearly 4 years!

After 4 years of development and promises ShiVa 2.0 has JUST gotten into beta access. See More

Top Pro

Straightforward pricing with capable free option

The free ShiVa Web version is limited to web publication, but otherwise has the same capabilities as the $200 ShiVa Basic. Upgrading to the $1000 ShiVa Advanced brings tools geared toward team development and professional releases, such as integrated SVN support and profiling tools. All versions are royalty-free. See More

Top Con

High Cost

Costs $200 for the basic version alone, which allows you to publish to any format other than web. The Team/Pro version costs $1000 See More

Top Pro

Lua can be used for fast coding and C++ for optimization

All game logic can be scripted in Lua. ShiVa also provides a cross-compiler from Lua to C++, allowing Lua scripts to be further optimized and compiled to native code for performance. See More

Top Pro

C++ plugin development options

Top Pro

Native C++ export

Top Pro

Robust

Top Pro

Competent GUI system

Top Pro

Great support

In addition to the help forum, Basic and Advanced licensees have chat and direct email access to the developers. See More

Esenthel

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Top Pro

Incredibly stable

The engine is rock solid and stable which, considering its extensive feature set, is a huge plus for game developers See More

Top Con

Lack of in-depth tutorials

There are plenty of beginner coding tutorials which serve as a basic introduction for a new user to get up to speed, but once having passed that stage there is a real lack of free more advanced tutorials/examples/code snippets demonstrating the finer details of the vast and varied API functions. See More

Specs

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux

Mobile targets:iOS; Android

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

Console targets:-

Top Pro

Access to full source code

Having easy access to the full source makes it possible for any skilled developer to add features that a project requires. See More

Top Con

One-man developer

Although the complete engine is maintained by a single, highly-skilled individual, he can be limited to what he is able to see or perceive, and sometimes he doesn't recognize broken or incomplete features until he sees it firsthand and sometimes doesn't recognize valid reports from his users. But when he does recognize the gap in the engine's feature-set, he is quick to make adjustments and updates. See More

Top Pro

Attractive licensing

Free to try, with license as cheap as 9.50$/month (with yearly subscription), 11.40$/month (monthly subscription) or full source code license 228$/year. See More

Top Con

Slow roadmap implementation

Bugs are fixed promptly, but the developer maintains a growing 'roadmap' of features with no indication to users of time frame and priority of feature implementation. See More

Top Pro

Collaborative development

Engine comes with tools allowing for multiple developers to work on one project at the same time in collaborative mode. Every change made is instantly visible by other team members. See More

Top Pro

Powerful and flexible

Built in pure C++ so it is easy to use and extend however needed. No slow scripting languages. See More

Top Pro

Available on Steam

Esenthel is available on Steam. It was Greenlit. See More

Top Pro

Integrated code editor

Editor has a built-in code editor which drastically simplifies the programming process. Programming with Esenthel is based on C++ language, however, when using the code editor there's no need to make separate .cpp or .h. Code can be written once and the editor will separating definitions and declarations automatically in the background allowing for quicker development. See More

Top Pro

Esenthel

Advanced collaborative cross-platform game engine, editor and development environment. Native integration with Nvidia PhysX, Oculus Rift, Facebook, AdMob, Recast Pathfinding, Bullet Physics. See More

Top Pro

Supports in-app purchases

IAP support for both mobile and desktop devices. See More

Top Pro

Oculus Rift native support

Oculus Rift API integrated into the engine platform. See More

Top Pro

Supports multiple compression libraries

LZMA, LZHAM, LZ4, ZLIB, Snappy, RLE See More

Top Pro

Can import a wide variety of formats

3D - FBX, DAE, OBJ, 3DS, B3D, MS3D, BVH, ASE, PSK/PSA 2D - BMP, PNG, JPG, TGA, DDS, TIF, WEBP, PSD, ICO Videos - VP9, Theora Sounds - OGG, WAV, MP3 (once decoding patents expire) See More

Top Pro

Supports modern graphics and sound APIs

Graphics - DirectX 9/10/11, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL Sound - DirectSound, OpenAL, OpenSL See More

Top Pro

Constant development and progress

New features or update to features are provided monthly. See More

Top Pro

Good support for Android and iOS

Android and iOS support is pretty stable and easy to develop on. It's possible to, for example, develop the entire game on Windows or Mac and then easily compile for Android and iOS. See More

Top Pro

Helpful and responsive forum

Top Pro

Engine issues are resolved quickly

The author is very device minded and able to handle any problem quickly and effectively and he has a good track record of listening to requests. See More

Rajawali

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Defold

Specs

Desktop targets:Windows; Linux; HTML5; OSX

Mobile targets:iOS; Android; FB Instant Games

Dev platforms:Windows; Linux; OSX

Console targets:Nintendo Switch

jPCT for Android

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The Minko Engine

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Cub3D

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EnterprisingTheispas's Experience

It's really easy to program games on the go, with Android, with this app. You can share your apps too! See More

PlayN

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Marmalade SDK

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Specs

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX

Mobile targets:iOS

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX

ShadingZen

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Linderdaum Engine

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