2D gaming engines (crossplatform)

[sourceninja]

I'm in the process of evaluating 2D engines for a upcoming tactical RPG I'm working on. I was wondering if any of you have any experience with any engines worth commenting on?

We are planning to target mobile devices first (ipad/iphone/maybe android), but also want to expand the game out to run on win/mac (linux would also be great) if the game proves to be well received by players.

So far I've been playing with the following:

Torque 2D - It's got a easy to use GUI for most of the work and a nice C++ ish scripting language to pull it all together. It can hit osx/windows/xbox 360/iphone/ipad which is a bunch of nice targets for our game ideas. So far in my testing, this is the only engine I've actually got to play with hands on (I built a simple "asteroid" game).

cocos2d for iphone - Looks to be a strong choice for all things apple. Supports ipad, ipods, iphones, and OSX. I've written in Obj-C before for a small personal project. By my partners have never used anything but C++, Java, and html/javascript/php.

Corona - Android and iPhone. Seems like one of the best choices if we only want to target mobile devices. Uses Lua, a language that I'm pretty familiar with.


Anything I'm missing I should be looking at? We want to target ipad/iphone first and I'm even ok with going with a engine that works the best for that platform and doing a complete rewrite if we ever wanted to look at other platforms.

 

[Cogman]

You probably really don't want to have to do a complete rewrite... Cross platform compatibility is a PITA to do, so grabbing an engine that looks like it can either hit every platform you want/expect or one that looks like it can grow to new platforms is your best bet. I would probably put that at the forefront of my decision making for this one.

 

[CFP]

Torque looks very versatile...

I'm a huge fan of their 3D engine that was used in Tribes 2.

 

[Samick]

I think Python's library Pygame is good for PC/Mac/Linux. It is running good on every platform. And Python is user-friendly programming language, so it is not very hard to read Python and Pygame code.

 

[Cogman]

I think Python's library Pygame is good for PC/Mac/Linux. It is running good on every platform. And Python is user-friendly programming language, so it is not very hard to read Python and Pygame code.

Python is a terrible idea for someone that is trying to develop a game for the Ipad/IPhone. You HAVE to jail break the device which is something that i don't think anyone trying to sell a game wants to do.

Couple that with how slow python is as a language and you have some pretty strong reasons not to use python in the mobile setting.

 

[Modelworks]

It is marketed as a 3d engine but Unity works well for 2d also. It has full support for all the mobile platforms as well. The cost of the engine is very reasonable for start ups and the support community is growing fast. It is probably one of the easiest cross platform engines I ever used. You can do ios, android, pc, wii without too many changes.
http://unity3d.com/

 

[tatteredpotato]

It is marketed as a 3d engine but Unity works well for 2d also. It has full support for all the mobile platforms as well. The cost of the engine is very reasonable for start ups and the support community is growing fast. It is probably one of the easiest cross platform engines I ever used. You can do ios, android, pc, wii without too many changes.
http://unity3d.com/

I've tinkered with Unity and it is pretty nice. You can implement your game logic in either Javascript, C#, or Boo. Their engine is compatible with tons of platforms (iOS, Android, Wii, Windows, Mac... supposedly Xbox 360 and PS3 in the near future too).

 

[Samick]

It is marketed as a 3d engine but Unity works well for 2d also. It has full support for all the mobile platforms as well. The cost of the engine is very reasonable for start ups and the support community is growing fast. It is probably one of the easiest cross platform engines I ever used. You can do ios, android, pc, wii without too many changes.
http://unity3d.com/

I agree with you. Unity is really good game engine. There are many standard assets in Unity which speeds up all things in game development. And if you need to run the game on Android, IOS, PC, Mac - it is a perfect solution.

 

[sourceninja]

Unity looks really nice, but I'm concerned with it making it harder then it needs to be for 2d gaming. We really don't have any interest in making 3d games at this point in time. We are all addicted to the old sprite based games of the nes/snes/gen era.

I'm just afraid of buying the stuff for unity, then needing to buy extra unity tools (like unitile) just to make the job reasonable for us. Seems like engines already designed for 2d have the stuff we want 'out of the box' so to speak.

 

[sourceninja]

Well, I'm still in the research phase, but I think I've found my solution.

We have decided our first game is going to be mobile only (iphone/ipad/ipod touch/android) and I'm really liking Corona. Combine that with LevelHelper and SpriteHelper and it looks like it a match made in heaven.

Time will tell I guess. I'm still trying to get the paperwork done to start the company, then we can dive into this thing.

 

[Markbnj]

Make sure to post some screenies and keep us up with developments as you go along. This thread inspired me to download Unity3 and play around with it. Pretty damn cool so far.