Essential Mobile Game Development Tools For Games
The gaming industry is one of the biggest in the world. It employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and as of 2017, rakes in a revenue of over $100 billion annually. That’s why a lot of developers and enthusiasts want to build their own games and rake in the dough.
With so many mobile game development tools on the market, we’ve compiled a list of useful tools that streamline the game dev process and optimize results.
There is no one magic tool that will solve all your problems, different mobile game development tools serve different purposes and audiences.
Below are the must-have mobile game development tools to choose from based on your needs.
Mobile Game Development Tools
Game Making Tools allow anyone to create a prototype or even a full-on game without writing a single line of code. They mostly depend on drag and drop frameworks, allowing you to build your game and release it as fast as possible.
With ease of use comes limitations. Even though these tools allow you to go beyond drag and drop and manipulate the code, you’re still limited by how much control you have over the game. This may be great for quick, simple games by newbies and amateurs, but wouldn’t suit large projects and corporates.
GameMaker Studio
GameMaker allows you to build games from start to finish using their drag and drop interface. It has everything you need to take your idea from concept to finished game.
For more advanced indie developers, GameMaker offers its own language which is similar to C, allowing you to go beyond drag and drop and have more control over your game. GameMaker helps you easily learn the language as you go. However, it’s only good for 2D games and trying to create a 3D game using GameMaker would be highly inconvenient.
Construct2
An HTML5 game creator with no coding or mobile game development knowledge required. It has a powerful event system where you can make your game do what it needs to do in a visual and human readable way.
It features a lot of flexible, pre-set behaviors and effects that can be great time savers and can be customized based on need. You can also preview and test your games instantly without having to wait for it to compile or build.
Fusion
Clickteam allows you to quickly create 2D/3D mobile games, providing you with a wide range of extension objects to accomplish any type of programming challenge you can think of.
It offers a visual editor where you can place and position all of the elements of your game or application including the characters, counters, strings of text, and more, using your mouse. Then you can set up the properties for each of your objects by clicking on checkboxes or selecting choices from drop-down menus.
Buildbox
Buildbox is drag-and-drop game building software focused on game creation without programming, coding, or scripting. The core audience for the software is entrepreneurs, designers, and other gaming enthusiasts without prior game development or coding knowledge.
Buildbox is a cross-platform development tool that can be run on both Windows Operating System and OSX. The main features of Buildbox are the image drop wheel, asset bar, options bar, collision editor, scene editor, monetization options, and sliders that change the physics within the game.
Unreal Engine
Arguably one of the most popular game engines in the world and “the most successful video game engine” as awarded by Guinness World Records. It’s definitely the best engine if you’re working on a large sophisticated game and you need a strong 3D game engine. The problem is that the size of the games will be relatively larger and you’ll need high-end devices to run the games.
Unity
Another widely used engine. Currently, 34% of the top 1,000 free mobile games are made with Unity. It’s a platform for artists, designers, and developers to create and collaborate on stunning cinematic content and gameplay sequences, using 2D and 3D design tools, instant play mode for rapid editing and iteration, and a powerful animation system.
While Unreal might be more popular with PC and console games, Unity is definitely more popular with mobile games and has become the go-to game engine for a lot of mobile game developers. It is also at the forefront of the growing VR market and it was used to make an estimated 90% of the Samsung Gear VR games and 53% of the Oculus Rift games at launch.
Marmalade SDK
The edge of Marmalade SDK is its “write once, run anywhere” concept. So you code once and then it’s compiled and executed on all of the supported platforms. This allows you to launch your mobile game in different stores, giving you maximum exposure on as many devices as possible in the shortest period of time.
It also lets you utilize many library files, samples, documentation, and tools needed to develop, test, and deploy mobile games.
