Okay so me and a friend from my college want to develope a game for android. We have so far developed 2 games in class at school and i moved on to a four year college and got a BA in game development. He is currently studying some programming. We want to make an android/ios game, but right now we are not sure of the engine we should use. I have heard great things bout unity, torque and game salad. As far as developers are concerned which engine would be the best to use or game development?
If you are going 2d I strongly suggests www.cocos2d-x.org. It is the cross platform C++ port of cocos2d. For 3d Unity looks like it is the way to go, but I do not have experience in 3d mobile game dev so I might be completely off...
We use Unity and we absolutely love it. Our latest game was released on iOS, Android, Mac and PC simultaneously and it only took ~10 days to port it to the various platforms. Unity is primarily for 3D games, however it can be used for 2D out of the box and there are some great options for 2D libraries to help you if you don't mind spending a few hundred dollars. I recently wrote about my experience making our latest game for 4 platforms simultaneously.
We use unity, it supports multi platform, 2D/3D and it is easy to use, cocos is optimized for 2D tho, so if you want to stick with 2D games, go for cocos.
Just one more 1+ for Unity from my side We are also developing additional tools for other developers working with Unity.
Yes it is stable, it exists since a few years now. In the sources I even saw that it has been modified by Zynga itself (it is LGPL so they have to submit the patches). Currently I'm using it to develop a small action/puzzle mobile game. I have been very pleased so far and didn't encountered any bugs. However I'm still in the middle of the development stage so I might have missed something...
I've gota give Unity a +1 myself too... There is a heap of community support, awesome plugins from developers like Prime 31 to handle all of the android, ios level stuff. And to top all of that off Unity supports Mono aka C# which gives you some great flexibility in what you can do with your code. Overall it's an excellent rapid game development tool that has enabled me to get my latest game completed in a 100 hour sprint
Unity is the best (I bough the 400$ IOS basic version). But I can point two majors flaw: - binarie size are huge. You can't go under 10MB, and it's hard to stay under the 20MB limit. - The IOS pro version cost 3000 $ in total.
Lets not forget the awesome addition the next Unity version will bring to the table. Just a few of the goodies: Multi-threaded rendering A high-performance designer-centric GUI system HDR rendering with gamma correction Native level-of-detail support Radiosity Normal Mapping lightmaps A particle effects system called Shuriken Improved occlusion culling An Integrated GPU profiler Built in pathfinding and crowd simulation Integrated version control support for Perforce and Subversion Asset cache server to accelerate import times 100-fold or more Improved workflow for editing multiple objects and working with prefabs And optimisations that Unity claim have made Unity3D 60 per cent faster
Lotsa Unity supporters in here. Maybe you can answer a couple questions that I can't seem to find on their site. -Is there a way I can test Unity for iPhone without having to pay anything? I'm assuming you can't test on your device, but maybe just in a simulator? -Is the $400 charge a 1 time fee or is it recurring? (with revenue staying under $100k). Thanks guys
There is a unity free version that u can try and it includes all the basic thing of unity, some developers even release a game with only the basic version of unity. You buy unity once and for all too, so there is nothing to worry about.
Thanks. From what I'm reading the free version of Unity only allows you to release for web or PC and no mobile devices. Still the 1 time fee is a great model for indies. Very tempting. I'll play around with the free version first. In the free version is there any type of iphone simulator you can run your game on?
Regarding Unity: to actually build to a real device or the simulator, you'll need an iOS license. I believe the free version comes with a 30 day trial of the iOS/Pro licenses so you can take it for a test drive. I can definitely give it a +1 as well, especially if you're considering multi-platform development. All of Mika Mobile's games have been built with Unity, so its definitely up to the task of 2d-style graphics given the right workflow.
I don't mind the cost so much as the $400 basic version does pretty much all I need, but the 20mb thing did irk me a little as I thought it would have an impact on downloads. So I started this thread (poll) to see what the gamers at large thought. Turns out most don't care and use wifi to download their games anyway! So now I'm not so worried about it
