GDevelop vs Modd.io

At this point, you need to separate the tileset maps or character animation sprite sheet before importing it to the engine, but the developers are working on this feature.

This makes doing the simplest things, like looking at one of your maps, hard to do. In looking into this program, it can stall a PC while trying to load a sample map.

This is a 100$ 2d-only game engine. You could of course use pre-rendered 3d graphics, but your games themselves will exist only in the x and y axes.

Although suggested otherwise, GDevelop doesn't compile the games - it just adds wrappers so each OS can run the HTML5 game it creates. That means it runs much, much slower than other engines that do compile games.

The Windows and Linux versions of GDevelop can each compile a native application; but the Windows version cannot compile for Linux, nor vice versa.

While the engine is free and open source as stated on the main website, it does not mention that some optional features and services are actually activated through a paid subscription (two tiers: 2€ and 7€). Those features are: no nag screen shown when debugging, additional metrics available on games dashboard, access to more than 2 cloud exports per day (unlimited local export can be done without subscription, provided the right packaging tools are installed and configured), easy removal of GDevelop splash screen (can be done manually without subscription).

Since it has a fully GUI editor, the objects you are allowed to add in your game are pretty generalized (PhysicsObject, TiledSprite, PlatformerObject, etc). This limits the freedom of a game developer while making a game, as the object msut follow the preset behaviours imposed on it.

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.