One of the first steps to start your game development journey is to decide how you are going to go about building your game. This might sound trivial, however, it’s actually a very important step in the overall design process of your game. If you choose the wrong game engine that doesn’t fully support your needs, you will throw away hours of development time that could be spent actually releasing your product for sale.
A game engine is a framework for game development that helps deliver the core functionality that games have, providing the structure and tools that a game requires. Some examples include a rendering engine for 2D or 3D graphics, physics, collision detection and response, sound, scripting, and more. Choosing a simple engine can be the most flexible, but there are other bits of information to also take into account.
In this article, I’m going to be going over the pros and cons of popular engines that I’ve personally used. Each engine has different features and supports different platforms. All these options can make it difficult to choose what’s best for your use case, but ultimately it comes down to personal preference and coding ability.
Before choosing a game engine, walk through the following considerations:
Those points are just a few things to consider before building your title. When it comes to templates, there are a fair amount of pre-built examples out there for a lot of different video game styles. Why code your game from scratch if you can buy something you need from an asset store, implement your ideas and publish? It has the potential to save you hours of time which could be better-spent marketing or working on driving sales for your title.
In addition, why would you want to code your game natively if there are third-party engines that support multiple platforms with a single code base? When there is an option to do cross-platform development, take it contingent on the features of the game engine being supported on the platforms you are targeting.
With that, let’s compare some game engines!
Unity gives you just about everything you need to build games in one package. It’s an integrated development framework that delivers rich solutions and out-of-the-box functionality to create games. It allows you to assemble assets and art into environments and scenes, add audio, special effects, lighting, and animations.
Unity is also the most popular game engine in the world, with a 45% market share, and touches over 600 million gamers across the globe.
Corona is a great 2D game engine for beginners looking to build cross-platform games for iOS, Android, Kindle, Windows, and more. And even better, Corona is completely free.
GameMaker is one of the older game engines out there. But with the recent launch of GameMaker Studio 2, the game engine just got much more powerful. Fast, friendly, and cross-platform, GameMaker allows you to build a game with a single codebase and publish it to run natively across multiple platforms.
Unreal Engine is another one of the most popular game engines available today and is known specifically for first-person shooters, but is great for MMORPGs, RPGs, fighting, and stealth games. Cross-platform, Unreal is compatible with a massive spectrum of operating systems and devices and there’s a good chance you’ve played an Unreal-powered game.
Ultimately, to make a decision you have to look at what platforms you want to target and how you plan on monetizing your product. I used to be a Corona developer from 2011-2013. It was an excellent engine that allowed me to iterate fast and target the two top platforms which were iOS and Android during that time.
However, now that new consoles and devices are being made, Unity seems to be supporting almost every new product. This is a huge advantage since using Unity allows you to release on platforms that other engines don’t support. Even though the hurdles to learn Unity are challenging, the reward is more than worth it.
Unreal Engine seems to be a better option for games needing graphically intensive performance and for companies that have very experienced development teams. However, for small companies looking to target multiple platforms and monetize effectively, Unity wins the battle.
Developers should also check out PubNub for developing real-time video games. Our API works with Unity, Corona, and an additional 70+ SDKs. Our API makes it incredibly easy to develop a real-time video game and doesn’t require you to setup your own servers.
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