Allegro vs Modd.io

Hobbyist developers coding alone may experience a learning curve with Allegro of about 200 hours (if you are rusty on C++). To learn quickly, see Mike Geig's tutorials at Fix By Proximity. This learning curve may be fine if you are considering going professional, but are still unsure.

For hobbyist developers not planning on going professional, you may want to look into a complete 2D game engine, rather than a coding library. For example, there are "non-coding" engines that provide support for coded plugins or scripting. But, if you are a dedicated hobbyist planning to use Allegro as your coding library of choice, you can still develop great games as a hobbyist.

If you are a fan of object oriented programming, and want to use this library, then the chances are that you are going to be creating a lot of wrappers for functions in this library.

In short, if you're a C++ person, it could be recommended to check out SFML instead.

Over the last updates, many useful features have been removed, making it harder to create more complex games.

Modd.io comes with its own security issues. Many of them have been used to destroy eachother's games, which completely busts your progress on your game unless you have backed it up by exporting it's JSON.

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Each asset is limited to 800kb (except for audio being 3mb) which is okay for simple assets but unacceptable for creating spritesheets for animations or tilesheets for the map.

No matter how well game maps are made, all of them look just not beautiful.

You cannot create a shake effect which is also urgently needed in complex game creation.

Such datatypes as arrays composed of numbers, strings, etc are needed to create complex games but just do not exist in this game engine.

Most of the staff team in the community are constantly behaving like jokers. It just always feels like 80% of the staff team is not the right pick for such a community.

The homepage allows players to join your game, but the way it works is just not good. The "unpopular 0 player" games get less exposure than the popular games. The tier system also puts a star on your game card which also lures players to your game making them think this game has a special event or something, giving a disadvantage to the less popular games which are still so called "Tier 1".

This engine is ready to use right away, but already starts dropping framerate at over 1000 units which are not very active.

Modd.io "tiers" all the games you create. The very basic tier, commonly called "Tier 1" is very limited and removes motivation to develop a game.

This engine has it's own IDE with a drag and drop style programming language. It does take a good 2 hours to get familiar with the API..

You cannot access lower-level APIs through this engine, such as the renderer.

All games in modd.io must support multi-player game mode.

Modd.io is designed to be good at making "specific" kind of multiplayer games. Its strength unleashes if you don't care too much about the specifics in UI. For example, if you wanted to make a casual death match game, it is extremely easy to make it using modd.io. However, if you want to create a puzzle game with a unique UI, it becomes very time consuming.

This engine is limited to 2D only.