I've been looking over a bunch of 2D Engines for Android development and I'm finding it fairly difficult to decide between all of the options. Many of the engines are no longer being developed and not all of them offer the same features.
The game I am developing will require fairly standard functionality:
Drag and Drop
Graphics Commands Optimized to Handle Low Sprite Count (~20)
Sounds/Music
Taking into account that I won't be creating a super-complex game and that I'm hoping to avoid a lot of the typical hassle with creating a GUI in Java, what plug-in would satisfy my needs in a simple and optimized fashion. So far I have looked into a group of engines including cocos2D, Angle, and various others.
The engine can either be under development or not, so long as it is a complete project.
Sorry if there are any grammar errors or any confusion, I'm up rather late after setting everything up/doing the research.
Many thanks in advance,
Justian M.
Related
Before we start: Yes, this question has been asked and answered for similar backgrounds a couple of times, but all extensive answers to this questions I could find are at least 2 years old and game engines come and go.
On top of that I have some specific requirements that I could not find being discussed in any of the posts.
What I want to accomplish is to create a 2D game. I have a background in Java programming and programmedd some simple Android apps (a messenger and stuff like that). I also have very basic C++, C# and JavaScript knowledge as well as OpenGL and building an own 3D engine (university project):
Should run on Android (version 5 or higher) and probably iOS (I haven't done anything with iOS yet so this will be my first project).
Needs some very basic physics for bullets/hit-tests (I can also code this if it's necessary so this more like a soft constraint but I'd prefer the engine or some simple library to do the work for me)
UI-components. Yes, I will need them and many will be text-oriented. Also scrollable components. I have seen many engines lacking these and coding it from scratch can be tedious. Also many engines make it hard to create more complex UIs which I would probably need.
In-App purchases. It would be really nice if wouldn't have to mess around with this too much.
Some nice graphic effects.. Parallax effects, particles (for magic spells, etc)
Communication with a centralized game server.
Notifications in the notification bar (with custom images and texts
Should be able to handle basica animations, play music and videos.
Should be able to integrate with Social media (Facebook and/or Twitter as a minimum). Would be nice to have something like "Like our page on Facebook to receive X coins).
Performance is probably NOT critical - I assume that any game engine fullfilling the other requirements is programmed sanely enough to be fast enough on a modern device.
Should be battle tested, not being abandoned, have a reasonable documentation and community
Rapid development should be possible. This is very important to me as I plan to change the style and other things quite often and let people test and comment the changes.
What I found are basically some different types of engines:
- Engines where one builds a game in a framework and manually adds native code for things the engine does not support, like LibGdx.
- HTML5-only engines that need some 3rd party app-wrappers like phaser + CocoonJS. Some other also provide this, like Kiwi.js.
- Monolithic engines that provide everything (okay only one: Unity).
From all of the engines I have seen I think Unity would fit my needs best, but then again I have no experience whatsoever with it.
What would you suggest?
I suggest you to look at GameMaker: Studio
Here is course on Lynda Learning GameMaker: Studio and GML
My thesis is to create an 3D android game. I have installed the 3D softwares like 3DS Max, ZBrush, Blender. I also downloaded Android SDK for Windows and I have Eclipse Juno. But I don't know how to start. Thank you in advance. :)
If you want to write a game, use a game engine.
I would advice against using OpenGL directly if you want to focus
on game mechanics or story. 3D game engines like
Unity or JMonkeyEngine
give you all the tools you need to turn your 3D assets into a game:
Importers for various file formats, a scene graph,
math libraries, and usually tons of example projects that get you
started quickly.
If you want to write a rendering engine, use OpenGL
With OpenGL you can build everything mentioned above yourself: Write
or find importers for your assets, figure out a lighting model, write
a scene graph. If you want to do all that, cool, use OpenGL. But
doing this technical stuff will keep you busy; you will have less time
to make a really great game.
I prefer OpenGL ES for Android. Good performance and easy enough to learn.
It's better to start from basic with opengl and then understand concept of using 3d and then prefer standard tool to use.
I have listed android game engine tool for 2d and 3d. Hope it might help u.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17163446/what-is-the-best-2d-game-engine-for-android/17166794#17166794
Start with unity3d which is a game engine, I am not sure but the names that you have posted are used for making 3d models for the game.
Your Thesis? That's pretty broad scope! :)
What I would be looking for, is something with lots of example code (since you say you don't know where to start) and good community involvement (ditto the start thing).
If you only need a single player setting, then I would suggest libGDX as a place that would be a good jumping off platform, as there are lots and lots of step thru tutorials along with lots of example code (and a very up to date wiki on the API), and a pretty good group at helping out with issues.
Since it is open source, you can dig as deep as you want into the inner workings to understand (or be mystified like me) as to how the code is accomplishing whatever task you are looking at. (which might be handy for your thesis)
While it might not be quite as polished as some other commercial 3d development kits, the BadLogic crew has made some very big progress the past few months on the 3d side of the house, along with breaking my JSON code... thanks! :) )
I have seen several posts here about cocos2d-android, so ambition to get more idea on it drag me at coco2ds-android-1 and a good example .
My analysis can not find any significant benefit of using coco2ds instead of usual 2d approach of surfaceView and SurfaceHolder.Callback .
I will be thankful if anybody have expertise over coco2ds-android will guide me about benefits to use it instead of usual gaming approach .
Just by clicking on links starting from the ones in OP, I have came across http://dan.clarke.name/2011/04/how-to-make-a-simple-android-game-with-cocos2d/ - which states the obvious answer you are looking for.
First of all, this is a 2D gaming engine. All of the physics and whatnot effects are just there for you. No need to re-implement from scratch
Secondly, this is actually a port of the iPhone gaming library with the same name - great news if you also plan on porting to iPhone. And thirdly it is open sourced, meaning you can tweak anything accordingly.
I have noticed however that this is a pure java library, so do not expect amazing performance. If performance is critical, google for something NDK based, not SDK based. I could not advise here as gaming is not my thing.
How should I begin learning game development with frameworks like Unity3D or Roar Engine?
I currently only know html/css and a tiny bit of php, e.g. nothing complex.
Regards,
Andrew
penelop is a very nice tutorial.
Here is the link http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/penelope.html
It is write by JavaScript. If you use C# , you can look at http://gltovar.com/blog/?p=35.
And also Unity3D's Documentation is write very great.
If I were you, I would have started up with Unity3D, and choosen JavaScript as programming language on it. Because of it is you can find so many resources easily on the Internet. There are so many videos, documents, web sites or something else. I have done like that at least, you know. To be honest, developing game using Unity3D game engine is simple. First, you will add some objects to scene. Second, control the relationship of objects to each other. And after that, you will find 3D models out for your game. In fact, you will search how to develop game for mobile devices. For example searching for touch functions and finally you have games on Google Play or AppStore etc. Just remember Unity3D game engine is multi-platform. That's the point to me. Because I develop a game only one time and I can duplicate it for other platforms, especially to Android OS from Windows.
By the way you said that you just have known html and css, a tiny bit of php. Don't care this situation. Unity3d has an unique structure. That doesn't mean this is easy. I mean that programming in Unity3D is enjoyable only. Just download free trial version and get start it. Good luck.
https://unity3d.com/unity/download
I only have experience with Unity3D and a tiny bit of SIO2. SIO2 is just a framework in C++ without GUI, i.e. yo use your favorite IDE (XCode, Eclipse, ...) and Blender for modelling. This seems to me pretty hard for a beginner.
On the other hand doing C# on Unity should not be that difficult for a PHP programmer. There are a lot of resources, my favourite is a 1 hour video tutorial by Matthew Campbell. It is a hands on session and after it you will have simple game on your smartphone, PC or whatever. The Documentation from Unity3D themselves is pretty good as well.
Another choice colud be Unreal engine (pretty good reputation), Bork3D or Torque
In general it will take some time to get some knowledge but it's pretty interesting stuff. Be prepared to do some math, especially when going into 3D. Keep in mend that games are strongly related to graphics design, nice thing but not too easy for programmers
My company uses Unity3D, and I have found it to be the most successfully-designed engine in terms of combining code and a UI-Editor for developers. In other words, I can code, and then hand of the same project to developers to work with it in the exact same engine it was started in. You can even customize the editor itself to streamline the coding process or give the later team a GUI to work with to edit code, without them having to go into the scripts and know how to do it that way. We also have an Unreal (UDK) team, and they love it. It is more similar to Valve's Hammer/(Source) Engine and uses a drag-and-drop system called (i believe) Kismet for all the coding.
As for coding languages, in Unity we use C#. It is a high-level and streamlined language from the .Net Framework and I have gone from knowing nothing to being pretty advanced in the course of a year. I highly recommend it. Good luck!
Hey all.... I am currently trying to make a game on the android platform. I want some guidelines on choosing a good android 2D game engine. I have been looking on the internet for sometime and have found these game engines to choose from the one which doesn't have a huge learning curve
AndEngine
libGdx (The one m most impressed by)
JMonkeyEngine
For anyone who wants to know more about the different game engines the following link should help you..
http://www.cuteandroid.com/ten-open-source-android-2d-or-3d-game-engine-for-android-developers
I intend to keep the interface simple yet attractive, so want to choose the correct engine, and also want to choose the correct engine using which making complex games also is easy in my future projects. If some one could tell me commercially used free (or open sourced) game engines i would be really grateful. I even wouldn't mind learning a 3D game engine if its learning curve is not that too steep and its implementation of 2D games is also pretty simple.
Andengine hides most of the complexity from you, so its super easy to get started, but because of this you do not have full control over it. The documentation or javadocs is close to zero, so dont expect anything from there.
As for libgdx, its harder to learn, but the community is bigger and more matured, and u have more control to the engine.
no idea about the monkey engine.