It’s hard to start planning and developing a game alone, or with others, if you’ve never done it before. So, I created this blog to show you how we’ve done it; at least the choosing a game engine part.
Deciding On a Game Engine
The actual hardest part was deciding on a game engine. There are so many options, which of most suck, to say the least.
To see which game engine we’d like the most, we picked out four game engines, which we’ve never used before, and made a working prototype in each. These four game engines were: Godot, MonoGame, LÖVE (love2d), and HaxeFlixel.
Neither me or my fellow developer likes UI-oriented workflows. They’re bloated, hard to learn, and everything is better if it’s only done with code. Wouldn’t you agree? (That's one of the biggest reasons to why we dropped Godot.)
Anyways, our criteria for the prototype were:
- 2D movement and movement based animations,
- tile map loading,
- a simple main menu,
- background music and sound effects playing,
- a simple dialog system.
Simple, right? Yes! It is simple! But the process of making this prototype in each game engine was vastly different. Note that we’ve tried out each game engine in the span of three days, so we didn’t have enough time to learn everything about each game engine.
The first game engine we made the prototype in was Godot. We were off to a great start, except that, that statement is completely false. The UI is very, very confusing. Took 2 hours of my so, so precious time for a simple prototype like that. The results were great, but it was just not worth the hassle. Skip.
The next game engine was MonoGame. It was... very unpleasant to do anything in MonoGame. It took a whopping 1 hour to make the prototype work. The product was great, and it felt a lot simpler to make it than in Godot; I was still very disappointed. The final results: skip.
The next game engine, and my personal favorite, was: LÖVE (love2d). Lua for game development? Hell yeah! All in all, it took 1 hour to make the prototype and holy was it very satisfying to write the code for it. If the next option didn't exist, we would've picked LÖVE. The final results: skip... but it was great!
The final game engine, and our final choice, was: HaxeFlixel. In all honesty, I've never heard of Haxe before this, but gosh darn it, it was such a great experience to do all of this stuff in HaxeFlixel. I immediately fell in love with Haxe's syntax and ease-of-use. The development workflow is simply amazing! But I don't really know how to explain it; you'd have to try for yourself to really see how great it is. Anyways, it took 1 hours to make the prototype. The final results: ABSOLUTELY LOVELY.
So yeah, our choice fell on HaxeFlixel. Even if you're not interested in serious game development, using HaxeFlixel is such a fun experience, that it deserves a try from everyone.
See y'all in the next dev blog post!
Top comments (4)
even though i never finished any game dev project, I love LÖVE! makes developer understand more about whats happening and how it is happening imo, and as someone who doesn't like quitting vim while on a project, i can clearly see why you prefer LÖVE as well lol
sad part for me is the art step though, as much as I love to and try to get better in art for game development, it's just going really really slow, maybe it will get better after I'm done with exams and get in to a university who knows
Fortunately, me and a few friends have assembled a small game developer team, so everyone can focus on what they can do the best. Be it programming, drawing, or making music. I don't know if you can do the same, but you should definitely try bringing up the idea with a few friends to distribute the production of elements for your game.
oh I wish i could, sadly they aren't interested at all, It's not that popular here specially at our age sadly
Love seeing you run through all these engines for real, feels like half the work is even choosing where to start. HaxeFlixel fans just gained another one, yeah?