The choice of a game engine or game designer for your project is, without a doubt, an extremely important and largely predetermining procedure, which must be taken very responsibly. Proper preparation for such a choice will help to correctly identify your needs and select the most appropriate software product to meet them. It’s important question in mobile game development.
Which Game Engine you should choose?
It’s worth noting that over the past two years, the line between game engines and game designers has been severely blurred. If earlier it was possible to say that a game engine is a bare piece of code with a minimal set of editors (or without them at all) and other delights that make life easier, and a constructor is a “closed” code, hung with all sorts of visual editors and supplied with certain basic content. now many game engines profess a “visual” approach to creating games, support all sorts of drag & drop principles, sliders, sliders, visual editors for almost everything in the world while minimizing manual writing of program code. The most striking example is the Unity game engine, which allows up to 90% of the work on creating a game to be carried out in its editor.
Proprietary vs open-sourse
So, what should you pay attention to when choosing the “heart” of your future game:
Capabilities. If the engine meets your minimum needs — it’s good if it can do more — it’s great, you can easily expand your game if necessary and use new features of the engine or constructor. The main thing is to maintain a balance between power and bulkiness, as mentioned above, it is unlikely that it will be a good idea to create Tetris on UE3.
Terms of Use. What requirements does the owner of the rights to the engine or constructor put forward to the developers using it? What rights does the developer have? Are there any additional payments if the game is successful? In general, in any case, you need to familiarize yourself with the conditions for using your tool in order to avoid surprises with game development.
Price. If you use a free edition of an engine or a constructor, can you “master” a full-fledged commercial license if things go uphill? Obviously, there is no point in trying to do something serious where you have to pay $ 1 million for a full commercial license (a conditional example).
Developer support. Is their product developing? Are bugs fixed? Are there new features, capabilities, etc.? All other things being equal, an engine that is developing dynamically is preferable to one whose development has been frozen, because in the event of some critical problem, in this case, you risk being left alone with it.
User community. Is the engine / constructor popular? Is there a large enough community of users who speak a language that you understand well? Are there specialized resources (sites, forums) dedicated to this engine? For popular software products, a greater number of lessons, examples, various forums are always available, they write about them in blogs, and so on – in a word, you will have many more sources of information and training materials. This is exactly the case when uniqueness is more a minus than a plus.
Documentation. How well is the documentation for certain engine components presented?
Support for third-party development tools. Are there complete scripts for import / export of models from popular 3D packages? Does the engine use any special data formats, and if so, have simple and convenient tools for converting to these formats been created?
Ease of use. How easy is the engine / constructor to learn? Is narrow specialized knowledge required to use it? Do you need serious user intervention in the source code to get the desired result? In environment design video games are taken into consideration all the nuances.
Conclusion
These are the questions you should try to answer when choosing an engine or game designer for your future game. The resource DevMaster.net and its base of game 3D engines (link is external) can be a good help in the matter of choice. As for mobile game development agency, in its work are used only the best reliable solutions.
