2D Cross-Platform Game Development Engines [closed]

Answer 1

Gideros is a great Lua based 2d cross platforms engine, currently supporting both Android and IOS platforms, but more to come. And it also has some great features as instant on device testing, auto scaling and auto image resolution to easily target various of screen sizes, as well as the option to extend each platform through native plugins.

Answer 2

I'm just answering to give you some insights on how the SDL is used. As you said before it's not a game engine (it's just a library actually). Furthermore, it is not object oriented at all and you don't have some easy animation facilities (you have to code them by yourself).

How it works (I used the C version but I guess the Lua binding should be similar):

Include the headers needed to build the project on the platform you want.

Design your own game loop in which you will set up (at least) a whole event processing system, frame rate manager and a "screen cleaner (or updater)" (I'm insisting on the fact that you have to manually refresh your screen using the SDL_flip_screen routine which is something that is not one of your concerns at all with Corona).

Then, code your game using all the "mechanics" you made before.

The SDL is a low level library (don't expect to have an easy to use GUI framework or the storyboard framework of Corona for instance).

Finally, this library was used to port Civilization III to Linux, so yes it works but it will ask you a lot of energy to have something like you had with Corona ;)

PS: I am not a native English speaker, so please let me know if I wasn't clear :)

Answer 3

I would recommend V-Play (v-play.net) - it's a cross-platform game engine based on Qt for iOS, Android, Symbian, MeeGo, Blackberry10 and also can export for native desktop applications for Windows, Mac and Linux.

It's based on C++ but has a neat scripting support for QML & JavaScript. QML is a no-brainer to learn and can boost your productivity as less code is needed - just see the comparison with cocos2d-x(60% less Loc) or Corona(15% less LoC) for a comparison of the same games.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the guys behind V-Play)

Answer 4

If you are into using Python, Kivy is a great solution these days. It compiles to all the platforms you ask for:

Kivy is running on Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Android and IOS. You can run the same code on all supported platforms. It can use natively most inputs protocols and devices like WM_Touch, WM_Pen, Mac OS X Trackpad and Magic Mouse, Mtdev, Linux Kernel HID, TUIO. A multi-touch mouse simulator is included.

Kivy uses lots of optimized code for graphics rendering (via Cython) so it is fast too.

Here is a speakerdeck that gives you some background and an overview (android specific).

Answer 5

No mention of App Game Kit (AGK) here so let me fill in the gap. It's a mainly 2D cross platform SDK allowing you to code once in either C++ or it's own "Basic" language. Version 2 just got over 400% funding on Kickstarter and will have full 3D support, Spine support (for 2D animated characters), bullet physics and whole bunch of other new features.

It already has Facebook, Twitter, a bunch of Ultrabook sensor commands, Box2D and more. I've been using it from the start and love it (can you tell?). No, I don't work for The Game Creators (the company that created it) although I admit I did do for a while making some apps.

One of the best features from my point of view is you can develop on Windows and broadcast from the IDE over Wi-Fi to any supported device, so while I'm coding I can (within seconds) test my code on iPad, Android, Windows, Mac or Blackberry Playbook.

Answer 6

How about HaxeFlixel? We have a great selection of demos, and of course support cross platform development via Haxe + OpenFL. This is an open source project hosted on GitHub. We support all major platforms (including iOS).