When comparing GameMaker Studio 2 vs LITIENGINE, the Slant community recommends GameMaker Studio 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” GameMaker Studio 2 is ranked 67th while LITIENGINE is ranked 87th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick prototyping
Pro Good user interface
Pro Well-optimized engine
Pro Has a trial version (but limited functions, can't export)
Pro Many unofficial tutorials
Most GMS1 tutorials are fine for GMS2
Pro Highly customizable IDE
Although users must work within the IDE and editor, GMS2 has many options to customize the look and feel
Pro Good documentation
Pro Huge, generous community
Pro Easy to use
Clean and well-designed API that is easily discoverable. Comes with a simple tool (utiLITI) for editing levels based on .tmx maps.
Pro Free an open-source
The engine is published under the MIT license and is entirely free to use.
Pro they are developing a beta for mac and linux
Pro Active and helpful community
Has an active forum and discord channel to discuss topics about the engine.
Cons
Con Not the best scripting language out there
GML is just weird; if you want to learn programming, it is not the best because it teaches bad habits and has many odd shortcuts and shortcomings that won't transfer to a real language
Con HTML5 export is buggy, doesn't "just work"
Con Quite expensive
Windows ($100) + HTML5 ($140) + Mobile ($400) + UWP ($400) is $1,050, plus $800 anually for each console export separately. But doesn't do anything any of the free engines can't do, and the stability and tech support aren't great.
Con Unstable
Users frequently report crashes and hangs, particularly when working with assets, and the software uses a complicated underlying meta-file structure that may become corrupted and cannot be rebuilt
Con Limited support for OOP
Con Small development team
The core programming team is only 5-10 people, with about 30 employees total, so bug fixes can take a long time to be addressed, and there aren't many official tutorials
Con Limited to Desktop
Games made with the engine only run on Windows, Linux and MacOS. There is no support for Android or HTML, yet.
