2D Game Engine Question: Unity2D, GameMaker or Cocos2d-JS?

rogernort

Hey guys

We're busy looking at porting 2 of our games away from flash (for obvious reasons, especially the need to be able to build for Android and iOS) and I thought it would be a good idea to bounce it off this community before settling. The games aren't very graphics heavy: chesscube.com (online chess portal) and pocketcricket.net (real cricket game dynamics with a comic look and feel).

We're looking at a solution that's going to allow us to build something quite quickly, don't need complex graphics and animations, but will be flexible enough to have rooms, multiplayer, currencies, purchases, etc. My current research is making me lean towards Cocos2d, Unity or GameMaker. Besides the cost, Unity seems like a bit of an overkill and at the moment we're leaning towards Cocos2D as it's javascript (that we already do) and open so that we can extend it if needed. (and free.)

Are there any others that you guys think we should be exploring? Does anyone have experience with Create.js vs Cocos?

Gazza_N

Unity's expensive, and Game Maker is great, but you'd have to rebuild your games from scratch. I'd not recommend Cocos - look at Starling instead. It's also free, multiplatform, fast, much more robust, and is also based around the Flash paradigm, which means you should pick it up quite quickly. You might want to give it a look: http://gamua.com/starling/

You may also want to consider Loom. It's Starling-based and uses its own scripting language (similar to JS), but has a good chunk of additional functionality built on top of that: http://www.loomsdk.com

FanieG

as it's javascript (that we already do) and open so that we can extend it if needed. (and free.)

javascript can be used in Unity too, and Unity does have a free version.

SkinnyBoy

I agree with @Gazza_N above. With starling you don't have to learn anything you don't already know, you just wrap your existing code into starling. Its just like putting your cold pizza into a microwave. If you have ever used xna, its also like turning an existing xna game into monogame. It only takes few minutes...

The following book shows you how to turn yr existing actionscript game into starling...

Introducing Starling by Thibault Imbert


The book should take about 3-6hours to read as its a very short book on converting yr existing games to starling.


A book that looks deeper into starling and shows you how to complete the whole game is the following...

Starling Game Development Essentials by Juwal Bose

Hope you get your answers.

rogernort

Hy guys, thanks for the input. Will definitely look at Starling - shot for the resources.

Out of interest, are there major downsides to using Cocos or is Starlings just much better?

Gazza_N

@rogernort: Cocos works, but Starling's just cleaner and better structured, which makes it easier to write for and better performance-wise. Loom used to be written using Cocos, but they got so frustrated with its shenanigans that they ported over to Starling instead. :P