When comparing Gideros vs Superpowers, the Slant community recommends Gideros for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Gideros is ranked 26th while Superpowers is ranked 71st. 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 Collaborative
You can spin up a server and work with other people at the same time.
Pro Supports both 2D and 3D
This isn't a 3D with 2D on the side type of engine. The scene-editor supports both 3D and 2D views, allowing ease of use no matter what type of game your making.
Pro Plugin based
The community can develop and release their own plugins to add additional features making game development easier. All of these plugins can be easily downloaded in the app.
Pro Lots of handy built-in editors
It's got a scene-editor, cubic-model creator, text-editor, 2D image / animation importer, and a very useful tile-map editor.
Pro Easy to use programming language
Games can be published to the web with good performance, and the game-framework utilizes TypeScript to make programming games a little bit nicer.
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 Not frequently updated
Although it's got very nice features as is, and the team does respond to issues at a pretty good rate, the engine itself takes a little while to get updates. It's a 3-4 person team, and they need to work jobs on the side in order to bring in income.
Even though the updates come out a little slower than other engines, the team is still very much committed to the project and still support it well.
