When comparing Goo Create vs Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator, the Slant community recommends Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator is ranked 21st while Goo Create is ranked 54th. 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 Really small project/game download sizes
Since GooCreate is native to the Web and uses WebGL directly, finished projects usually have a much smaller (sometimes orders of magnitude) download sizes compared to tools like Unity.
Pro Visual State Machine Editor
The visual state machine editor in GooCreate enables the addition of advanced interactivity without having to directly code it in JavaScript. Artists can add movement to objects, react to clicks and other events or even trigger changes in other state machines via events.
Pro Scripting via the JavaScript programming language
Pro Integrated physics engine (Cannon.js)
GooCreate is tightly integrated with the Cannon.js physics engine making it super simple to add advanced physics simulations to any project. Cannon.js is available at http://www.cannonjs.org/.
Pro Web based scene editor, no installation or plugin needed
Pro Particle systems
Pro Open game engine and physics engine
The Goo.js engine is fully open source and available at https://github.com/GooTechnologies/goojs
Pro FBX model importer supporting embedded textures and skin based animation
Pro Real-time WYSIWYG Hierarchical scene graph editor
Pro Advanced Code/Text Editor with auto completion for Engine APIs
Pro Custom publishing template CSS and JavaScript
Usually when publishing you are forced to use a template provided by the service (with a logo, social buttons, etc) or you have to download the project to customize it. In GooCreate you can pick from a few different configurable templates and then, if that is not enough, you can add custom CSS and JavaScript that gets added to the page header (i.e. JS and CSS will be run/applied before the scene even starts to load) letting you style the loading screen and any other aspects of the page without having to download anything and still being able to make use of the hosting service GooCreate provides.
Pro Good material editor
Material editor supports diffuse color, normal maps, specularity, emissiveness, opacity, reflectivity and refractivity.
Pro Timeline editor to animate entities
Pro Projects can be distributed via a web link or packaged for Android and iOS
Pro Good variety of post effects
Post effects including bloom, motion blur, anti aliasing, levels, contrast, vignette and edge detection.
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.
Cons
Con Going out of business
Goo create is facing bankruptcy.
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.