My Cross Platform Game Engine Adventure

A very good game engine

Nice community behind it

A very wide future set

Native language so its fast, really fast

Can output for every major mobile platforms

Hard to get started because of lack of tutorials.

An unusual approach for game developers who has flash background

You have to setup for each platform

You may have to write lots of workarounds

It’s a really well designed game engine

Nice community behind it

Is fast enough for 2d games

Can output for every major mobile platforms

Can benefit from opensource as3 libraries

One setup, deploy everywhere

Lots of tutorials and examples for startups

Disadvantages of starling are mainly because flash platform.

No threading ( mobile ) which is vital for AI and network

It takes time to compile and test on device.

There is not an elegant approach for native extensions.

Your code can be decompiled ( change ipa to zip > decompress > show the package contents of app file > decompile the swf )

It’s not fast as native

It’s a stable and commonly used engine

Output is really fast so you don’t have to worry about performance

Have elegant native extension approach

Nice feature set

Can deploy every major platform with no effort

It is used by game companies.

Good examples

It’s not a game framework actually  It may be a base to your framework

Needs a wrapper

Hard to learn

You can’t find any tutorial except marmalade’s own site

Support is limited (mainly for premium users)

Unlike marmalade sdk it targets game development

Has a great documentation about xoml development ( 230 pages of book )

Nice feature set

Can benefit all of the advantages of marmalade

Is coming with an complete game example

It’s aim is developing all the game logic from xml which is not suitable for lots of game programmers

There is not enough documentation and wrong examples for direct coding (coding with cpp not xml )

Doesn’t have an api doc so you have to check the book for everything.

Poor forum support

Doesn’t have a good structure, its open to make mistakes very easy.

Work in progress, team leader states that it is a base for a commercial product.

Easy to learn

Nice feature set

Because of lua you don’t need to compile everytime. When you save your file the game scene is updated automatically

Allows native extensions

Lack of proper IDE.

When a performance issue occurs you may not do anything about it.

Easy to learn

Open source

Squirrel is an easy to learn scripting language but there is not an ide support for this language. Which means you have to change all of your work setup.

Unlike lua, squirrel know-how is not re-usable for other platforms

A solid system works for every major platform

Easy to learn

No need to compile every change, easy to test

Rich feature set

Has an embedded editor and a very nice component architecture

God damn expensive for 2d games ( if you don’t want to show unity splash page on startup it costs 4500 $ for ios and android)

It’s focus is not 2d so you have to buy extra tools for 2d. ( sprite manager, ezgui etc.)

Asset store is also ridiculously expensive, community is not mature enough to share information and code.

Simplest application file size is 8 mb.

Easy to learn for flash developers

Has a very good native extension implementation

Has threading

Very good community support ( Forum, irc etc. )

Better performance then flash

Lots of IDE support ( My favorite IntelliJ has official support )

Easy to publish every platform

Lots of opensource flash tools are also available for haxe

Is hard to debug

It takes time get used to setup IDE

If you are not familiar with terminal or command line, it may be weird to get used to