Hello Gamedev community!

This has probably been asked before somewhere but I couldn't find anything really relatable to what I wanted so I am going to ask anyway.

What I am wondering is what game engine do you prefer and what do you think I should use for making a simple 2D mobile game. I have in the past developed different 2D games as well as 3D games in different libraries and engines such as SFML and Unreal Engine 4. I am going to be the lone creator of the mobile game (at least as far as coding goes) and I am looking for an engine that is easy to use and easy to learn, as well as being powerful enough to make mobile games fit for the market. My top contenders right now are Defold (the fact than King owns it makes it a bit scary) and Unity 3D. I haven't used these engines before but I figured they would probably be powerful enough. I could also code up my own engine but that feels a bit like reinventing the wheel when there already are a ton of good engines out there.

Should probably mention that I can code so any coding language is fine, and even a coding heavy engine is fine.

So what engine do you recommend? Defold, Unity 3D, making my own engine or any other?

Thanks in advance!

If you've used Unreal Engine 4, then why not continue with that and evaluate its mobile capabilities? It's been making some decent movement on that front ever since it became available for public use. If you need better customization of rendering and something more light weight, then I would recommend checking out Unity3D. It works quite well for mobile and you can get it to do a decent amount of stuff before performance starts becoming an issue on devices.

They're both freely available. Download both and see what you prefer.

Sorry for the late responses, just finished the semester and had quite alot of work to do, anyway thnk you for answering. I went ahead and did just this. I was a bit unsure about the capabilities of different engines and wanted some answers from people who maybe had worked with them. But trying several out myself (doing simple things like a Pong game with Huds and things) showed clearly differences between the engines.

So it worked out alright!

If you've used Unreal Engine 4, then why not continue with that and evaluate its mobile capabilities? It's been making some decent movement on that front ever since it became available for public use. If you need better customization of rendering and something more light weight, then I would recommend checking out Unity3D. It works quite well for mobile and you can get it to do a decent amount of stuff before performance starts becoming an issue on devices.

I was thinking about UE4 but since I will release on the mobile platform I want my games to only contain the bare minimum. And from my experience releasing games with UE4 leads to very large builds, not sure if you can bring down the size for projects to a reasonable size. So far my tests has shown when making the same game and building it for windows in different engines the sizes vary quite alot: Defold ~ 10mb, Godot ~17mb, Unity3d ~ 32mb. And I will presume that with Unreal the project size would be even larger, resulting in an unnecessary file-size for the simplicity I want in my game.

You specified 2d games for mobile. I think Gamemaker: Studio is the best thing out there for 2d games. Note that I did not include 3d, and in this case that means forget about 3d with GMStudio. If you want 3d, I would suggest Unity, though if you have used UE4, you might be better off with that. Note though that each one has certain limitations on size and performance. My understanding is that UE4 isn't very performant on mobile yet, while Unity does pretty well generally. But then for 2d only, GMStudio tends to be really performant. And GMStudio has less overhead, not having to include any of the 3d things like Unity/UE4 do, making the installers smaller generally as well.

Okay I might check it out, I have had quite alot of preconceptions about Gamemaker, about it being a bad engine that you should stay away from. But maybe that's changed over the years. (sorta like the preconceptions people had about Unity a few years back.) But thanks for the advice I will look into it a bit more.

Other than that, my choice right now falls on Defold, will do a bit more testing with some more engines and test some thing with Defold but it's from my testing a really simple and neat engine. The only thing it lacks right now is support for extensions like admob and things like that, the team is currently working on this and it will which hopefully be added before the release of the game.

Hello,

Some really useful info in this thread, thanks. But I would like to ask: how scalable are Unity and UT4 on mobiles? For example, if I make a game with a minimal size (just bare bones) and then add lots of graphics, how much will the size increase? Is it linear? Does it get progressively more compressed with more data?

And one more thing, what is the best (or standard) resolution for mobile games?

Just for clarification, I' talking about a 2D game, with some 3D elements (mostly menu and parallax effect between sprites to create depth).

Hi Solarius, and welcome to GameDev!

Some really useful info in this thread, thanks. But I would like to ask: how scalable are Unity and UT4 on mobiles? For example, if I make a game with a minimal size (just bare bones) and then add lots of graphics, how much will the size increase? Is it linear? Does it get progressively more compressed with more data?

It will increase with the size of the content you add. Images does not compress much more, since they are already compressed, and a 2D game is mostly lots of images.

With smart game design, you re-use a lot of the images though, so you can have a long game experience without increasing the size more.

So linear with respect to graphics added, but possibly non-linear with respect to game experience time, but that depends on the design of the actual game.

And one more thing, what is the best (or standard) resolution for mobile games?

I don't think there is a standard. It's partly a design choice. But in general, graphics on mobile devices, specially for 2D are surprisingly high resolution, if you want to use the full DPI of a modern smartphone. (an iphone has a DPI of over 300, many android phones have even higher resolution then that!)

But you can reduce the resolution to save space without much loss, but how much depends on the style of your game.

Most games does not use the full resolution.

Obviously a pixel style game would have much lower DPI on it's graphics resources.

Just a note; to get the most out of your question, you should post a new thread instead of asking a new question in an old thread.