Scirra Blog

Seeing as you listed Game Maker there, I would throw in a recommendation for Construct 2 by Scirra: https://scirra.com

They have an excellent 2D HTML5 game engine and a very nice IDE to go with it. The event programming system they use is at least powerful as Game Maker's GML (if not more so) and you can also write your own plugins with JavaScript. Out of three mentioned programs, C2 is definitely my favorite for a couple reasons:

- It's built from ground up with 2D development in mind. Unity in comparison is primarily for 3D development, and while its 2D tools have improved over the years the difference is still really obvious.

- The overall user interface design of C2 is actually from this decade and makes good use of big screens of today. In comparison, you can still very much see the relatively ancient roots in Game Maker's UI when programs were designed with 640x480 screens in mind, not to mention how tons of features added over the years have just been slapped haphazardly into wherever there was room in the UI at the time. Game Maker's drag & drop coding is also just terrible, it's really either GML or go home with it.

- Pricing. You don't have to pay any extra for additional exporters or such with C2. Of course, there is the caveat of having to pay extra attention to mobile performance with C2 games being HTML5-powered on everything it exports to, but on actual computers you can cover the Windows/OSX/Linux combo very nicely.

Now, I mostly do game development as a…

>Is having to learn a game engine going to be faster than starting from the ground up?

Yes, pretty much by definition, since a game engine saves you the time of writing an engine. ;)

Unity[0] and Game Maker[1] both come with tutorials which will show you how to build a basic game quickly. Game Maker uses its own properietary scripting language called GML, and Unity lets you do scripting in Javascript, C++, and Boo, which is basically Python. Also, attempts are being made to integrate Clojure support in Unity as well[2]

On the other hand, if you like actually writing the code, there's a good chance there's a low-level framework (like SDL[3] for C++) which will let you code, but still take care of some of the hassle of cross-platform support and graphics. I've only played around* with SDL and C++ but there are quite a few tutorials for it.

Also worth mentioning is Construct2[4], a game engine for html5/js. It is possible to do 3d rendering in javascript/html5[5], but as far as I know, only Chrome supports it well. Last I checked you have to change the config settings in firefox to allow opengl rendering to work and I just assume IE doesn't support it by default.

If you want to work with 3D and want to get something done then Unity might be a good idea, although of course you're going to need good models, etc. Game Maker supports 3d but it's primarily for 2d.

[0] http://unity3d.com/

[1] https://www.yoyogames.com/studio

[2]…

Thanks, this post is also very useful to me as a hobbist working on a FLOSS game (RPG) construction engine. I hadn't heard of Cordova or of the ability to run Win 10 universal apps on XBox One and web apps on Wii U. Sounds like it might be a good idea to port from native desktop to HTML5/JS using emscripten, and then port that to these non-desktop platforms. Was there much work involved in porting to XBone or Wii U?

In [1] you wrote

It's not clear whether this UWP app support is actually
intended for games publishing, whether game UWP apps will
be accepted for the Xbox, or if you're meant to use some
other publishing option.

Do you know any more about that now?

[1] https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/26/run-your-construct-2-games-as-xbox-one-apps

This is a bit ridiculous to be honest. I'm 15 and don't consider myself a programming, in fact I would say I can't program at all. But me and a friend "wrote"(well, we modified a few examples we found online and using a lot of pre-written code) a few Android apps one or two years ago. It was far away from this advanced thing as a game, but I don't really think it's a huge thing just because he's 14. Also, there is tools[1] these days that do most stuff for you. Using them I would probably been able to ship apps and games back when I got into these stuff. I don't want to ship products though, well not anymore, I want to write good code.

[1]
https://www.scirra.com/
http://andromo.com/

Hi there!

It's great to see someone so young who is getting into game design. We have some software called Construct 2 which is aimed at non programmers and as a time saving device, you can see it at http://www.scirra.com (a quick video of how it works at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RlSmkSbleI). You and your son might really enjoy using it! (Also exports to HTML5 games)

I'm not aware of us having any users as young as 4 years old, but we would love to hear if he enjoys using it and can make games in it!

I'm happy to give you a free license for it in return for some feedback if you want, don't worry if not :) Just send me an email if you want it.

Tom

First thing I'll say is that I really don't like the idea of using Flash, HTML5 etc any web technology for making games. However I see the need for it.
I'd like to get more information though how your game engine makes it easier to create faster/prettier games. I am a fan of Construct2 (http://www.scirra.com/construct2). They make it really easy to create HTML5 games (it is all point and click, no programming required).

What differentiates your technology from the many existing ones on the market now?

Before the negative/hate comments star pouring in, maybe the OP/founders can give us an insight and some more information on what their plans are.