Picking the right tools
There are tons of options when it comes to game development, different engines and frameworks to work with. We're going to take a look at some reviews of three of the tools suggested by Pablo (my professor): Phaser, Cocos2D-js and GDevelop.
A little reddit search helped me find this thread, Phaser is one of the first frameworks recommended for HTML5 development. It is also the top rated and most popular of the three options at html5gameengine.com.
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons:
- Pros
- Very well documented open source framework
- Lots of examples and tutorials available
- Active community
- Cons
- Couldn’t find any big ones
Moving on, let’s take a look at Cocos2D-js. There seems to be less of a buzz about this one online, some people complain about support and bug-fixes for the js branch. Let’s see some pros and cons:
- Pros
- Open source
- Cross platform
- Used by many established mobile game developers
- Cons
- Unorthodox API, some reviews point out the mix of Objective-C and C++ on the engine.
- Not as straight-forward as raw JavaScript, because of Objective-C origins.
Basically Cocos2D-JS is similar to Phaser, another JavaScript-based engine but less intuitive.
Last but not least, there’s GDevelop. This engine is completely different from the other two, it comes with a simple interface and has visual scripting, which makes the creation of prototypes a lot easier. Let’s see some pros and cons:
- Pros
- Visual scripting tends to be easier and quicker
- Free and open source
- Cons
- Not ideal for big projects.
Conclusion
So here’s what I’ll do, I’m going to give Phaser a try, I’m not a huge fan of JavaScript and I’m far from good at it, but the engine seems to have great potential so I’ll see if I can do some decent prototypes.
If I fail miserably, I’ll go with GDevelop because of how easy visual scripting is.