When comparing Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator vs Ren'Py, the Slant community recommends Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator is ranked 10th while Ren'Py is ranked 39th. The most important reason people chose Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Highly active community for questions and support
Cocos2d-x forums are active.
Pro OpenGL hardware acceleration
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.
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).
Pro No external dependencies
Because it is based on Pyglet.
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).
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();
.
Pro Allows for easy debugging
It has a built-in Python interpreter that allows for easy debugging.
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.
Pro Great video tutorials
Hundreds of video tutorials available.
Pro Cross-platform
Available on Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS and Android.
Pro Active and friendly community
Pro Reasonably good at creating puzzle and point-and-click games
Cons
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.
Con No Graphics user interface
Con Modest functionality
Almost all free alternatives are more convenient, faster, and more functional.
Con Not for every genre
While technically capable of creating 2D games in any genre, Ren'Py excels in creating visual novels and has a reasonable feature set for creating puzzle and point-and-click games. Other genres are best tackled by other engines.
Con Outdated Documentation and official built-in tutorials
Unfortunately, you will have to hunt relevant info on how Ren'py script works. The Ren'Py dev has the working tutorials on his Patreon, other than that you might as well just code in Python.