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This post is a comparison post between different game engines. It will help beginners in game development to pick a suitable game engine.

Ahmed Khalifa, Blogger

March 15, 2017

15 Min Read

Hello everyone, Before I start, I just want to say, this post is reflecting my own opinions about different game engine and it is not intended to be taken beyond that scope. I had a chat with Dan (a friend of mine at the Game Innovation Lab) about how many new game developers don't know a lot about different game engines. Once the discussion ended, he asked me to post about game engines, and rate them according to difficulty and complexity. Nowadays there are more game engines than in the early days of indiegame development. The funny thing is only a few of them are popular such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and Game Maker. To list all engines, I am going to divide them into categories: Educational (made for children), Specialized (for a single genre/type of games), and Generic engines. This categorization is just to help you find the best tool for what you are doing, but really any tool that allows you to add some programming, either by writing code or using logic trees (logic trees are a way of programming by building a tree of conditions), can be used to create any game. The problem is using any of these tools outside its intended scope is harder than using an other tool. Engines vary in popularity. Popular game engines have a big user base which helps a lot when you have bugs. While using unpopular engine can be a good thing as you work very close to the developers themselves and you can request changes easier from them. Also, these developer can help you in promoting your game more than popular engines because the success of your game is also reflect the success of their engine. Warning, this is a long post and if you don't have time, you can jump to a summary table that outlines them all at the end of the post (link).

Educational Engines:

These are tools designed to encourage people to design games and to help them to learn how to do it.

  • Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/): is an MIT tool that helps children to create stories, animation, and games. The tool allows you to program your own logic, by designing logic trees and attaching them to different objects in the scene. Scratch is more generic than you can expect, but it is hard to design very complicated games using it. Scratch produces html games to be played in the web, and all the created games are hosted on their website. You can check their top games here (https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/121998/)

Specialized Engines:

These are tools designed to prototype certain game genres/types in a very fast/efficient way.

Generic Engines:

These are the most generic tools to create games. Unity, Unreal, and Game Maker are part of it, but they are not everything. Always choose the tool that is suitable for the project and for your capabilities. Don't pick a tool that needs programming if you are not good at it. Don't worry: all generic tools can do everything, so just pick what fits you.

These are some of the game engines that have a neat and nice IDE to help you in developing. There is other game engines that I didn't list because they are only code based. Some of these engine are popular between game developers such as Phaser (JavaScript), PlayCanvas (JavaScript), LibGDX (Java), Defold (Lua), Flixel (ActionScript), OpenFl (HaXe), MonoGame (C#), FlashPunk (ActionScript), HaxeFlixel (HaXe), Starling (ActionScript), HaxePunk (HaXe), Love (Lua), Otter (C#), Ogre3D (C++) and etc. There are more engines out there than most people know. This game engine list is sorted by how complex the engine is, then how famous the engine is. Now, after knowing about all these, you have to choose wisely what fits you. The following table summarize all the tools (All generic tools can be used for 2D or 3D games.).

Engine Name

Type

Coding

Platform

Target Outputs

Popularity

Cost

Scratch

Specific (2D Generic)

No

Web IDE

HTML5 only in the program

Popular between children

Free

Bitsy

Specific (2D Story based Topdown)

No

Web IDE

HTML5

Not popular

Free

Dungeon Decorator

Educational (2D Story based Platformer)

No

Web IDE

HTML5 only in the program

Not popular

Free

Twine

Specific (Interactive Stories)

Optional (Javascript)

Web IDE

HTML5

Popular

Free

ChoiceScript

Specific (Interactive Stories)

No

Any text editor

HTML5

Popular

Free

Ink

Specific (Interactive Stories)

No

Win / Mac / Linux

Any Target

Moderate

Free

Inform

Specific (Interactive Stories)

No

Win / Mac / Linux

HTML5

Moderate

Free

Adventure Game Studio

Specific (2D Point Click Adventure)

No

Win

Win

Moderate

Free

RPG in a Box

Specific (3D RPG)

No

Win / Mac / Linux

Win / Mac / Linux

Not popular

$20

RPG Maker

Specific (2D JRPG)

Optional (Ruby / Javascript)

Win / Mac

Crossplatform

Moderate

Limited ($80)

PuzzleScript

Specific (2D Turnbase Puzzle)

No

Web IDE

HTML5

Moderate

Free

Construct 2

Generic (2D)

No

Win

Crossplatform

Popular

Limited ($100)

Stencyl

Generic (2D)

Optional (HaXe)

Win / Mac / Linux

Crossplatform

Popular

Limited ($100)

Game Maker

Generic (2D)

Optional (GML)

Win

Crossplatform

Popular

Limited (>$99)

Multimedia Fusion 2.5

Generic (2D)

No

Win

Crossplatform

Moderate

Limited (>$100)

GDevelop

Generic (2D)

No

Win / Mac / Linux / iOS / Android

Crossplatform

Not popular

Free

Gamesalad

Generic (2D)

No

Win/Mac

Crossplatform

Not popular

Subscription ($17)

Gamebuilder Studio

Generic (2D)

No

Win / Mac

Crossplatform

Not popular

Limited ($100)

Buildbox

Generic (2D)

No

Win/Mac

Crossplatform

Not popular

Subscription ($99)

Voxatron

Generic (3D)

Not sure

Win/Mac/Linux

HTML5

Not popular

$20

Pico-8

Generic (2D)

Yes (Lua)

Win / Mac / Linux

HTML5

Moderate

$15

PixelVision 8

Generic (2D)

Yes (Lua)

Win / Mac / Linux

Crossplatform

Not popular

$10

Unity

Generic (2D/3D)

Yes (C#/JavaScript)

Win / Mac / Linux

Crossplatform

Popular

Free (Subscription >$35)

Unreal Engine

Generic (3D)

Yes (C++)

Win / Mac

Crossplatform

Popular

Free (pay %5 revenue)

Cryengine

Generic (3D)

Yes (Lua)

Win

Win / Linux / Xbox / PS4

Moderate

Subscription (>$50)

Cocos Creator

Generic (2D)

Yes (JavaScript or CoffeeScript)

Win / Mac

Crossplatform

Moderate

Free

MightyEditor

Generic (2D)

Yes (JavaScript)

Web IDE

Crossplatform

High

Subscription (>$5)

Phaser Editor

Generic (2D)

Yes (JavaScript)

Win / Linux

Crossplatform

High

1 Year Free (>$45)

Superpowers

Generic (2D/3D)

Yes (Typescript)

Win / Mac / Linux

HTML5

Not popular

Free

Godot

Generic (2D/3D)

Yes (Python)

Win / Mac / Linux

Crossplatform

Not popular

Free

In the end, I would love to thank my friends Gabriella Barros and Dan Gopstein for all their effort, feedback and help in creating this post. Bye Bye Ahmed Khalifa

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