The Best Mobile Game Development Tools

Who doesn’t have a mobile gadget nowadays? Anyone who plays games does. Anyone who makes them does too. The world of game developing tools has changed to suit the ever-growing needs of the audience.

That is why it is virtually impossible to create an indie game without mobile game development tools. Let’s take a look at a few.

1.    Unreal Engine by Epic Games

You don’t need special coding skills to improve your game with this game development suite. You can take advantage of a C++ engine and editor source code. The tool has wonderful online community support and a bunch of templates so it’s a great one for those, who are just starting out.

Professional devs will also appreciate the engine for its material editor, powerful blueprint engine, and built-in support for Android, iOS, and PC. Simple porting allows you to create multi-platform games without any efforts.

Pricing: Free

2.    Wwise by AudioKinetics

If audio and music are important to your game, and it should be, look into Wwise. It helps you integrate the audio assets into your game. Wwise has a variety of useful features, which might scare you off at first. But once you spend a couple minutes dealing with the settings, you realize what a powerful and useful tool this is. Wwise integrates with Unity, Unreal, and Lumberyard.

You add your audio to a special folder and then create events for the audio and assign the assets to the event. It’s as easy as pie. You can adjust the audio, play around with the volume, and correct pitches. Pay attention to a grand randomizing function that can give an extra oomph to your game.

Pricing:  Free for games with under 200 audio assets

3.    Unity from Unity Technologies

Unity is impossible to pass by since it’s a leading tool in the world of game development. Many leading software developers from Tricension Software Consulting use Unity tools for their projects. Unity is grand for building simple games. It’s a great choice for the beginners since it has a big variety of preset modes.

Professional developers can take advantage of some extensions (free and paid) to make the software suit their level. It works on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Fire OS, and Tizen.

Pricing: Free for personal use

4.    Marmalade SDK by Marmalade Tech

Building cross-platform C++ games have never been easier. Pro Evolutions Soccer (PES) 2011 and Need for Speed Shift were developed with Marmalade SDK. It allows you to use other C++ libraries during the development process. It’s far from being the best choice for the beginners but can be a wonderful option for professionals, who are rediscovering the mobile world.

It features code examples, tools to simplify coding, an option of testing apps on different platforms, and 2D and 3D development support. It supports the specific features of iOS and Android, has a code checker for ARM-platform, and more. Marmalade is well known for high speed. The only downside is a few glitches, which the manufacturer seems to be working on.

Pricing: $599

5.    Project Anarchy from Havok

How many games do you know that used Havok as the engine? Medal of Honor, Max Payne, Halo, Assassin’s Creed, to name a few. Now you have the engine and other Havok products available for free in Project Anarchy.

This package for mobile game developers has a variety of useful features, a huge library of sample materials and videos to improve your development, debugging, asset management, and more. Developers also get a direct C++ access so they can customize the engine to suit their needs.

Pricing: Free, the pro version pricing depends on the contract terms.

6.    MonoGame by Mono Game

This is a great tool for beginner developers who deal with 2D games. It is essentially XNA for all platforms. The project works with any C# and .Net languages. The variety of tutorials and support documents for MonoGame is impressive. In case you already have some game developing experience, using it will be easy as pie.

MonoGame works on Windows Phone, Android, and iOS. A great advantage of this software is that it has the same structure as Microsoft FX files. It provides text format for simplified editing.

Pricing: Free.

7.    NextPeer

NextPeer allows adding multi-player gaming to single-player games. The software development kit gives you an opportunity to add customizable features, such as joining real-time games, social tournaments, etc. Basically, it allows player interaction for mobile gaming. Any game can become a multi-player game with a small effort on your part.

The best part about this tool is that it’s easy to use for both the developer and the player. Multi-playing improves gaming experience greatly, giving you high scores for your development efforts.

Pricing: Free