Favorite Game Engine?

[Evan Burchard]

What do you guys like? 

 

Are you more into the nuts and bolts type engines like easel or crafty?  Or do you like the high level game maker engines like Construct 2 and Game Maker? 

[-AAG-]

Game Maker since 2005. See here and here.

[Dream Of Sleeping]

I've been learning easeljs. It's my first time using a framework. I much prefer writing everything myself because then if there is a bug I know what all the code is doing and I can fix it. Plus when you write all the code you don't have to go on forums and ask "How am I supposed to do this?". You can just think yourself "How can I do this?"

 

However I think it's a good idea to learn, so I can see how other people do things. Then one day I can go and write my own frame work and take the bits I like.

 

The way I see it is I've written my own tweening code and rendering code (which was fairy rubbish, the tweening was only linear), and because I've done that  I'm now happy to use someone elses and learn from it, but as I haven't wrote much collision detection I don't want to use an engine that does that for me until I've learned it myself. Then when that becomes old news to me i'll use an engine handles that.

[antonio]

My first »game« I did in plain JS/Canvas. Now I started to look at LibGDX, which allows you to write the game/app in Java and export an Android/Native/HTML5-App.  

[joannesalfa]

I'm a graphic designer, I write Javascript functions with jQuery for web pages, actually I'm interested about videogame development for cross-platform, I learned how to create HTML5 canvas from scratch but it would take a lot of time when I make another Zelda classic clone, then I choose Construct 2 is considered as the best editor and fastest way to create games, sometimes it doesn't have extra API and behaviors what I need, I used to create my own plugin with Javascript SDK to satisfy my needing after all.

[mwatt]

I'm still just a beginner at writing games, but I wanted to put in a good word for Enchant.js.  It seems reasonably capable and pretty darn simple.  I suspect however, that I will want something more powerful in the end.  I have my eye on phaser.js at the moment, but would like to see it mature just a bit.

 

I want to go with HTML5 / JavaScript that is pure in the sense that I still want to code.  Not that I mind a library - I need one at this point.  However, as the spectrum of solutions moves from libraries to frameworks, more and more gets done for the coder, which is both good and bad.  I worked through 4 or 5 tutorials with Game Maker a few months ago, and it works.... but I wanted more control - it shields you a lot and of course is forced to be opinionated while doing so. I have never played with Construct but from what I have read, I suspect that I might feel a bit "too far away from the coding metal" with that engine too.

[Lazer]

ImpactJS for me. I started out with it when first learning to make JS/HTML5 games and am still using it now.

[P.Uri.Tanner]

I love to write all the easy code myself and use a library for the "hard" part (i.e. pushing to the Renderer).

So pure JS + _.extend() and a library that handles drawing like http://threejs.org/ or http://www.pixijs.com/.

 

Fore Game JAMs i usually go with impactjs. It's fast and easy to handle.

[Raiper34]

It was hard for me... I used Game maker 5 , then 7 then i found exelent construct classic (i worked in this 3 years) and then i tryed lot and lot of engines and programs.... but then i returned to Construct 2

[Psychho]

Metrix.js, its a simple library im writing with an entity and collision system to quickly create 3D WebGL games with three.js. It also wraps the three.js renderer,scene and camera into a class and handles all of the initialization of three.js in one line(Metrix.Initialize()).

[@99golems]

My first few games were pure js and canvas. Then I got ImpactJS and I love it. dabbled in other things like threejs and pixi, but i always keep coming back to Impactjs. I really like how impact handles OO and inheritance. basic collision, basic physics, and a level editor are all icing on the cake.

[Lazer]

My first few games were pure js and canvas. Then I got ImpactJS and I love it. dabbled in other things like threejs and pixi, but i always keep coming back to Impactjs. I really like how impact handles OO and inheritance. basic collision, basic physics, and a level editor are all icing on the cake.

 

Have you tried Impact++ yet? Looks like it enhances Impact quite a bit, I'm looking forward to trying it out for a later project.

[Evan Burchard]

Metrix.js, its a simple library im writing with an entity and collision system to quickly create 3D WebGL games with three.js. It also wraps the three.js renderer,scene and camera into a class and handles all of the initialization of three.js in one line(Metrix.Initialize()).

 

Is Metrix hosted anywhere?  That sounds pretty awesome.

[@99golems]

Have you tried Impact++ yet? Looks like it enhances Impact quite a bit, I'm looking forward to trying it out for a later project.

Wow that looks really useful, especially ig.InputPoint , I really could have used a lot of those additions before I went and spent dev time writing my own.

 

I might try doing a game with impact++ soon. I'm also looking forward to impact 2.0.

[Psychho]

Is Metrix hosted anywhere?  That sounds pretty awesome.

You can download it and checkout the docs http://psych.gs/public_html/metrix.html

Its only version 0.1 so theres no forums yet and the docs are very very limited but video tutorials are coming soon!

Also theres a demo of 900 cubes bouncing on randomly generated terrain if you want to take a look at that http://psych.gs/public_html/playgame.php?gameId=Metrix.js 0.1 - 900 cubes on heightmap

[LudovicCluber]

Before learning how to use any game engine I think it's priceless to start by doing your firsts tiny games from scratch with Javascript and Canvas.

 

Especially if you work alone and plan to start with several small 2D games. Which is a very good idea anyway.

 

I started like this and ended up with my own game engine.

 

So if I had to chose, I would chose a low level engine.

 

Going deep into the code to make things happen is good practice because every game engine has its limits and when you reach those limits you don't want to be stuck.

[triptych]

Just an FYI: http://html5gameengine.com/ <-- lists many of the major engines for you to try out.

 

Personally, I've made my own rpg engine on top of YUI, and I'm trying to find the time to build something with Construct 2 .

[Gio]

We're now using our own WADE engine, but previously we used impact.js and enchant.js, both very good -  I would recommend them both. Though we ran into some performance problems with larger-scale projects.

 

I am personally a big fan of the Construct2 UI, it's great if you need to get things done quickly. But then again, it's not nearly as flexible as I would like. I think we need something with that kind of easy-to-use UI, but that allows you to work at a much lower level when you need to and the drag-n-drop functionality is not enough. If we ever get the time to make something like that, we'll do it... eventually

[Evan Burchard]

Just an FYI: http://html5gameengine.com/ <-- lists many of the major engines for you to try out.

 

Personally, I've made my own rpg engine on top of YUI, and I'm trying to find the time to build something with Construct 2 .

 

Is your RPG engine open source?  Is it hosted anywhere?

 

Another list I've found to be useful is on jster.net: http://jster.net/category/game-engines

 

Some people on this list would probably be pleased to see pixi on top.

[hakura88]

I like the Unity3d Engine. This Engine has all in there and you can create everything u like.

 

Unity3d + Blender . Top

[Dream Of Sleeping]

I like the Unity3d Engine. This Engine has all in there and you can create everything u like.

 

Unity3d + Blender . Top

 

What is it like to work with? Is it like a game maker type thing where you just drag and drop or do you actually get to do a lot of coding?

 

Has anyone tried crafy? I think it looks interesting but the documentation is rubbish, with most of the links broken. What is it with frameworks having crap instructions? They must miss out on so many new developers. The only reason I chose easeljs over pixi is because easeljs tells you how to use it.  Although I realise pixi is still very new so I'll let them off.

[Psychho]

I like the Unity3d Engine. This Engine has all in there and you can create everything u like.

 

Unity3d + Blender . Top

Unity3D isn't HTML5 doe.

[ByR]

I love construct2, i can do prototypes VERY fast so i can try a lot of ideas.

[akorukmez]

i think best engine is pure javascript

[TheHermit]

The first thing I tried for web-games was Construct 2, but I couldn't stand it. It ended up being far too hard to generalize certain things or make things that didn't fit nicely into the kind of game the engine was expecting you to make. For example, I wanted to make a choose-your-own-adventure type thing, but I spent far too long trying to figure out how to get it to do some sort of popup window that could be filled with arbitrary text and decision branches. It was just too restrictive to certain kinds of games, so I dropped it.

 

I ended up using Quintus, which is an open-source engine that is pretty minimal right now. I've had to go into the guts of it several times to fix this or that, but the upside is that I was able to go into it and fix my problems, rather than being stuck with something that just wasn't going to work.

 

After ~3 months of working with Quintus, I find myself sometimes wanting to just make my own engine. There are a few standard tricks I found that I like to use, which I've implemented as a sort of library of things on top of Quintus, but some of them aren't really logically consistent with Quintus' mode (DOM-based stuff mostly). On top of that, certain performance tricks would require me to dive into the guts of Quintus to implement - for example, using multiple canvasses to take advantage of GPU compositing - which would be more comfortable in an engine that I wrote from scratch. 

 

That said, I do appreciate having all of the browser-specific implementation tricks taken care of for me.