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[Raisapius]

I'm a programmer who's used to working with a library like SFML or SDL, and building a game off of that. But now it seems like everyone's looking for people who have experience with engines like Unity, UDK, etc., rather than "lower-level" coders like myself. I feel outdated because of that, but I'm willing to catch up.

So, I'm trying to find an engine that most people would want experienced users of, but would be easy for me to adapt to. I've tried Unity, but it just feels so alien to me. Any suggestions? I've been thinking of trying out UDK.

[eigenbom]

I'm sure there's plenty of work for low-level coding when using UDK etc, or any of those engines that provide you with the full source when buying a license. Quite a few of the last games I've played have UDK stamped on them, so I'm sure that's as good a choice as any to learn the ins and outs of.

[rbgrn]

Hey guys, I notice that BatteryTech isn't on your list.  I'm one of the primary developers so thought I'd throw some info your way.

Name:  BatteryTech Engine
URL:  http://www.batterytechsdk.com
Price:  $249 indie, $999 commercial
License:  One-time purchase only, lifetime
Platforms supported: Android, iOS, BB10, Windows, OSX
Graphics library support:  OpenGL 1.0-2.0, OpenGL ES 1.0-2.0
Platform systems/libraries provided:  GL, Audio, Networking, Input, Sensor, Math, Image/Audio decoding, UI
2D Support: Batched sprite collections, Texture Atlases
3D Support: Per pixel lighting, multiple light sources, Hardware animation, Collada, OBJ
Scripting language used:  Lua
Other info:  Complete Box2D integration, available via Lua
Source code availability:  Provided for licensees
Free trial available

So let me know if you have any questions or need additional info and I'll do my best to answer.  Hope that's enough to add to the list.

Thanks!

[Nathan Cash]

It looks pretty cool. I will not be using it as I have a dislike for Lua (stems from when I played Roblox a few years back.) I like how you can create your own engine as well as use yours. I wish your dev team the best of luck!

EDIT: Has anyone mentioned the source engine yet?

[dracullsoft]

And a free one: Ice2D™ Game Engine - royalty free game/sprite engine for 2D/IsoMetric and simpler 3D cut scenes.

Name:  Ice2D Game Engine
URL:  http://www.ice2d.com
Price:  $0
License: custom but royalty free both commercial and indie or freeware - anyway you like for games.
Platforms supported:  Windows
Graphics library support:  DirectX 9c
Audio: BASS or DirectShow
Size: Around 1 MB (uncompressed) (Single COM DLL)
Program Languages: VB.NET/C#.net 2010/2012 VB6 and other COM enabled languages.
Source code availability:  Closed Source, lots of examples in SDK. Download SDK and Engine from Forum
Wiki : http://www.ice2d.com/wiki
Forum: http://www.ice2d.com/forum

Capabilities: 2D Sprites, 2D Particles, 2D Tween, Video playback on textures, Webcam capture on Texture, Texture handling and flexible blitting 2D and 3D, Isometric Map and isometric sprite and object, Simple Game Scene manager, +Simple 3D Mesh Lights Camera, Music and multichannel directshow sound buffers (or oldscool tracker music via BASS etc)

[psi-punk]

Is Corona SDK worth a mention in this thread? I haven't used it. I saw it referred to as an alternative to Torque 2D. Im not sure if it belongs here or not?

http://www.coronalabs.com

[Jay Tholen]

Hey guys.
I'm sort of posting on behalf of my programmer friend. I'm just going to blab out a bunch of his requirements and see what you guys think:

1) He loves coding in C#. If there's any way he can get away with using that language, it would save us a lot of time.

2) The game will need to be out on iOS, Android, PC, etc. Basically everything. Consoles would be nice, but not necessary.

3) The game is a surreal 2D adventure game with 16bit-ish graphics. It's slightly more exploration based than your traditional adventure game, but the controls still (basically) follow the traditional point and click pattern. The game will have very little text in it save for sparse bits of dialogue.

4) Audio is important.

We don't mind paying for something, but we don't want to get licensed for an engine and then realize that there was a better option out there. Any recommendations?

[powly]

For a point and click, you might be better off with just rolling your own engine. The biggest challenge that instantly comes to mind would be to make everything easily editable - hard-coding a full adventure game makes no sense, better have a sane text file system or - even better - a simple editor for it. Still nothing that would take decades and a thousand man team to complete.

If you really want to publish on those platforms, C# is a no-go, it only works on Windows (maybe including Windows phones, not sure about that..) If my memory serves, iOS demands Objective-C and android eats pretty much anything that normal linux distros do.

EDIT: Okay, I hear Unity is all C# like, so it's probably a very good candidate.

[biomechanic]

There's this thing: http://monogame.codeplex.com/ which is "an Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework", but you will need MonoTouch (iOS) and Mono for Android to publish to those platforms, and licenses to these are $299 each.

From the engines in this thread there's Unity, which would cost you $400 for the basic iOS license and another $400 for Android basic. If you want Pro licenses, you'd have to spend $1500 for Unity Pro, another $1500 for iOS Pro, and $1500 for Android Pro.

[Francisco Tufró]

I'd like to suggest adding Moai SDK to the Free & Open Source engines!!

[kamac]

Jay Tholen,

Basically, your best bet is C++... All free, works on Windows Phone 8, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, Mac "you name it".

Oh, let me make a lovely table:

Language	Windows	Linux	Mac	Android	iOS	WP8
C++	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Java	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N
C#	Y	Y	Y	Y*	Y*	Y

* Requires additional payment

[pinaster]

The op must updated Torque 2d and 3d are open source now under a mit license. EDIT: it was discussed just one page ago, sorry.

Also someone needs 10k $ to port Torque 2d on Android: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/162475234/torque-2d-mit-game-engine-for-android-based-device

[SF]

I have to say that reading that initial post it felt like you have a chip on your shoulder concerning Unity or something.

The "crippled functionality" in the free version (which you can make commercial games with free of royalties, incidentally) only locks out features which I never see in 90% of indie games anyway.

They have a Linux port in public beta and have been working on it for 2 years already.

And frankly paying ~$2k for the tools which you're going to be staking your business on, which come with no limits on the number of products you release and no royalties, which probably saves you well over $2k in person-hours lost to codebase rewriting when your game goes multiplatform (as it should), and which has an integrated system through which you can recoup your costs by easily selling licenses to pieces of your original content, is pretty damn cheap.

How pray-tell exactly is Unity "reported to be problematic to work with if you try to do something outside what it is intended for."...?

[SolarLune]

^ The fact that the free version has less features might be why you see less of them in indie games? If all of the features were available to the free version, then you'd probably see more Unity games, as well as more Unity games with shadows, screen filters, and the whole shebang. Since the free version is 'crippled', most indie games made with Unity may just opt for the free version, thereby adding to the number that makes it seem like "most indie games don't use pro features".

Also, perhaps people don't have $2000 to stake their business on. Maybe they just want a cheap (or even better, free) tool for making games as a hobby rather than as a full-on business. Or, maybe they are just wary about sinking $2000 into something that may or may not produce something that will see the light of day or make back that $2000.

I would like to hear about how Unity is problematic at certain tasks, though. Seems like most bugs and problems can be bypassed with coding.

@OP - BennuGD could be added. It's kind of a weird language and engine, and Spanish seems to be the main language spoken on the forums (though there are English forum sections, and most of the wiki is in English). However, it's cross-platform like nobody's business, and it's kind of fun to try out languages that do things a little differently.

[SF]

I meant they're features I don't see in 90% of indie games made with any framework, rather.

Agreed that it makes sense to go for something free if it's just a hobby project or what have you. If you have a business that you can't afford to spend two thousand dollars on though I'd say you're in trouble already.

[SolarLune]

I meant they're features I don't see in 90% of indie games made with any framework, rather.

Agreed that it makes sense to go for something free if it's just a hobby project or what have you. If you have a business that you can't afford to spend two thousand dollars on though I'd say you're in trouble already.

The following wall of text is just my opinion:

The problem to me is that Unity doesn't offer anything that you can't get anywhere else. If you can code even semi-competently, you could probably just grab Panda3D, or JME3, or even Ogre or Irrlicht and a couple of other libraries and get to the same result with Unity with time. Even the Blender Game Engine can do a lot of Unity's features (soft and orthographic shadows, custom GLSL shaders, 2D screen filters, Bullet physics, simple scripting language, etc. I prefer it to Panda3D and JME3 so far, anyway...).

The same thing goes for the once reasonably priced Game Maker. I understand that Studio adds features, but $50 for something that will need to be repurchased in a couple of years? $99 for the Pro version and another $99 for the ability to export to Linux (Ubuntu)? With Stencylworks, $79 a year just to export desktop runtimes? If you're going for pure 2D, why not just grab Flixel / FlashPunk / PyGame / Love2D / BennuGD / Allegro / whatever and get to work? While they're not engines, but rather frameworks, is it really worth the cash just for a GUI front-end?

Now, I'm not saying engines like Unity, GM, or Stencylworks are junk - by no means. I grew up on Game Maker, and bought Game Maker 8 as I really liked it. They're definitely fun and easy to use, and I would probably recommend an engine with a GUI over an engine without for a beginner.

Knowing Python and having had a bit of experience with ActionScript, though, I now think that it's not that hard to just use a free code-based engine or framework as opposed to a paid one with a GUI. Admittedly, I haven't completed a whole game in pure code alone, but to me, the most difficult part with a 2D engine is having a level editor. With editors like Tiled and DAME, though, I could see making a game from "scratch".

As a side-note, I grabbed my old, purchased Game Maker 8 from my old computer and moved it to my current one. It didn't work. As far as I know, there's not really any way to transfer licenses, and they're no longer supporting 8. :\

TL;DR > I dunno, I just don't want to get into ^ that situation with another engine, so the price of an engine is kind of important to me personally. I mean, would I want to buy another version after Unity 4 turns into Unity 5, with other engines that are available?

Unity might be tons faster than Panda3D and it is most definitely faster than the BGE, but do I really need that extra power for my indie game? Probably not. I probably would like that extra screen filter or shader for my game, though.

[SF]

Now I'm no industry veteran, but I can definitely say that picking your engine based on a theoretically maximized feature set is something that should only be of concern to AAA studios (which is why they all go with Unreal/CryEngine or something proprietary).

It takes a lot more than being a semi-competent coder to reimplement the features these engines have thrown years and giant specialized teams into researching and developing. You're never going to make something as fast or as pretty, and you're certainly not going to implement them all in ($2,000)/(your pay rate) hours. Performance does matters to indie devs, for one on mobile platforms (obviously), and for another on PC as it is a deciding factor in the size of your potential customer base. Writing all your tech by hand also means writing every port by hand, so you'd have to be an absolute polymath to reach the same number of target platforms with any level of quality.

I mean, maybe I'm looking at this in a different context than you are, but $50 for something that needs to possibly be repurchased in 2 years seems like absolutely nothing to me. This is the tools of your trade we're talking about after all.

Also do you really think the likes of PyGame are ready for the commercial space....? Or even for making something that someone would bother downloading for free? Don't get me wrong, Python is my favourite language, but I feel like it's an example that supports my point entirely. The performance in it is just dreadful, it's not a commercial product so support is spotty at best (last post on the website is from June 2012), you could implement a tonne of extra graphical features in it but no one has bothered to reinvent that wheel yet, and as a result, every game made with it practically looks and plays like Windows 95-era freeware.

I think the way Overgrowth has been turning out is evidence of how dangerous this trap is to fall into. Wolfire completely devoted themselves to doing what you suggest; trying to beat the large commercial engines at their own game. They developed some very impressive (for the time) tech way back when the project started, but it's been what, 7 years now? (5 officially) And by now their game is generations behind in terms of graphics, still has next to no content, still has their original placeholder animations and the first real iteration of their combat system, and is rapidly getting pared down from its prior concept.

Selection is a critical stage in every craft and a skill in its own right. There's more to it than shopping.

[siskavard]

Is there a legitimate reason why all of these game making programs charge extra for Android & Mac store exporting, or is just a blatant cash grab?

[SF]

It's probably part cash, part the fact that it subsidizes the development of their mobile-specific toolkits. Rendering and GUIs and whatnot aren't trivial to port.

[SolarLune]

@SF - I was referring mainly to going with a pre-made free, code-based engine over a paid engine. not coding things by hand with OpenGL or anything like that, which is what your post sounds like, ("reimplement the features these engines have thrown years and giant specialized teams into researching and developing").

Basically, I meant situations like: Unity Pro has shadows, while Engine X also supports shadows. All I need to do for Engine X is enable it and tweak its settings on each light in the scene via a for-loop.

As for "Is PyGame ready for commercial space," I'm the last guy to ask, since I'm by no means experienced. However, if you can make a complete game in it, as far as I see, there's nothing wrong with it. PyGame may not be quick, but it's easy to use, and the need for performance depends on the project.

Also, PyGame hasn't had a post on its site since June 2012 (which isn't that long ago; it's not like it's dead), while Python has been updated.

I definitely agree with you that selection is a critical stage, and there's more to it than just picking the lowest-cost option. On the other hand, cost and what you're using it for still matter. UDK might be the best choice for a game engine, but that doesn't mean I should shell out as much as they ask in royalties just because of that. For example, I would be insane to get UDK to make Mario Brothers. No, not Super Mario Brothers. MARIO BROS.