Modern Game Engines

Many people dream of creating their own game. But before you start developing it, you need to decide on the game engine, of which there are a huge variety.

What is a game engine? In short, it is a set of systems that simplify the most commonly used functions of the game. You can, of course, write the engine from scratch yourself, but it will take an unreasonably long time. In this article, we will look at popular game engines for developing games for mobile devices. By comparing their capabilities, you can choose the one that suits you best and create your next big hit.

Let's take a look at the list!

Corona SDK

The Corona SDK is a cross-platform game development engine for iOS and Android. The API allows you to make 2D games and also helps you create complex functions using the Lua-based API. Alternatively, you can monetize the Corona SDK with Corona Ads. Development with Corona is easy enough thanks to real-time testing.

Corona includes cool features like Corona Editor, Sublime Text plugin and many more. The Composer GUI, available on OS X, will provide you with a graphical environment where you can create levels for games and see how objects interact with each other using Corona's physics engine.

Unreal Engine

UE4 allows you to create high quality projects with a small group of developers due to powerful tools (in particular, visual scripting through Blueprint), open source code and a constant growth of the community.

There is a free version of Unreal Engine, the transition to the Pro version will cost a pretty penny.

Unreal Engine uses C ++, with which you can develop games for iOS and Android. The engine has a powerful editor that contains several highly specialized editors. Mastering them will greatly help you in development. Some editors can even replace certain programs. The interaction of all these subsystems is simply a masterpiece.

The visualization in the editor is great. It's just that the eyes run up from the abundance of rendering options (related, for example, to lighting or to the complexity of shaders). Here you will find tons of cutting edge shaders that also come with the engine. Basically, Unreal offers the best rendering engine on the market. You can create amazingly beautiful scenes.

Unity

Unity is considered one of the best game engines in the industry. There is a free version that can be used to create 2D and 3D games. It covers 24 platforms: mobile, VR, desktop, consoles and web platforms. The engine supports three scripting languages: C #, JavaScript (modification), Boo (Python dialect). Unity has a simple Drag & Drop interface that is easy to customize. It consists of various windows, so you can debug the game right in the editor. A project in Unity is divided into scenes (levels) - separate files containing their game worlds with a set of objects, scenarios and settings.

Unity development example: mobile game development agency.

Phaser

Phaser is a framework for developing desktop and mobile HTML5 games based on the PIXI.js library. Supports rendering in Canvas and WebGL, animated sprites, particles, audio, various input methods and object physics. Phaser is open source licensed under the MIT license. This means that you can use the code without restrictions, but with the preservation of copyright notices in copies of the software, that is, in the text of your license you will need to add an indication of the copyright for this framework. He is well supported by Richard Davy and the community that has sprung up around him.

Cocos2d-x

Cocos2d-x, launched in 2010, is an open source project licensed under the MIT license. Game development in Cocos2d-x is based on the use of sprites. With the help of these containers, all sorts of scenes are created, for example, game locations, or menus. The sprites are controlled using animation or program code in C ++, JavaScript or Lua. Thanks to the modern visual interface, sprites can be easily modified, moved, scaled and otherwise manipulated.

Big guys like Zynga, Wooga, Glu, Big Fish Games, Konami, mobile game UI design use Cocos2d-x for game development.

Cocos2D

Cocos2d is an open-source framework that is Swift and Objective-C compatible. It has iOS and OS X support as well as Android via the SpriteBuilder Android plugin (assuming your code is in Objective-C). Swift support for Android is under development.