When comparing Gideros vs Twine, the Slant community recommends Gideros for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Gideros is ranked 26th while Twine is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Gideros is:
Gideros provides on device players for iOS and Android that can be used to instantly try out your code directly from the Gideros IDE.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Instant on device testing
Gideros provides on device players for iOS and Android that can be used to instantly try out your code directly from the Gideros IDE.
Pro Auto scaling and image resolutions
Gideros provides an easy way to target various screen sizes by providing automatic scaling options and choosing the best image resolution based on device screen automatically
Pro Local builds
You can build apps without an online dependency.
Pro Friendly & helpful community
Gideros has an active forum where you can find friendly and helpful advice.
Pro New features and improvements are released regularly
Gideros is being constantly updated and improved by the main developers.
Pro All in one studio, no complicated setup
Gideros Studio is incredibly easy to set up. Once installed it is very easy to create a new project or open one of the many example projects. Trying out an example on the desktop is two clicks away.
Pro Easy plugin architecture
Gideros Studio has a very powerful feature which enables developers to use a C/C++/Java/ObjC library next to Lua. This way it's possible to call the library functions under Lua, get the results and interpret them directly under Gideros Studio.
Pro Supports many platforms
Gideros supports iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, WindowsRT, Windows Phone and HTML5 platforms.
Pro Amazing 2D performance
2D performance is amazing.
Pro Very easy to learn
Gideros uses the Lua programming language which is very easy to learn (and very powerful). There are some excellent video tutorials too, to help you get started. The Gideros forum community are also very friendly and helpful if you any any problems.
Pro Easy to understand
The basics are very easy to grasp, and you can have a basic story up in minutes.
Pro Free for commercial projects
Twine is based on a GPL licence. You are free to download, modify and publish derivatives - even commercially.
Cons
Con Few resources, but growing
Gideros has a small community, and therefore do not have as many "How to make a game" tutorials. However, there are a couple of excellent books available that can take you through the fundamentals.
Con The Gideros IDE is not as fully featured as other IDEs
The Gideros IDE is not as fully featured as other IDEs, but you can easily use the very powerful and compatible ZeroBrane Studio IDE.
Con Limited to interactive fiction
Twine is specialized to decision-based interactive fiction. Under the hood, a Twine game is just a flowchart for page transitions; the only way to add more complex behavior is to code it from scratch in JavaScript.
