Hi,

I am trying to find an ideal game engine for my game idea (which would be 2d). Ideally for me, it would be best on my budget for the game engine to be free (e.g. Godot, Gdevelop etc) however if my game idea would best suit a gaming engine that does come at a price, then please do suggest these too.

My Background
At the moment my only experience with gaming engines has been Construct 2 which I paid for at the time (not 3 although I understand that they work the same) and a little Stencyl and coding in general, I have done Android SDK, OOP pascal, a little python, BASH scripting to name some.

My Game idea in Summary (Not giving it all away!)
The player (You) has control, of sorts, numerous characters on screen (probably starts of with 10).
These characters will not need to be maintained and will have their own personalities and will mill around the screen doing different things (this will need to be added to the logic of the game)
When one or more characters state changes , this will then make the player try and change that state, otherwise the “enemy” will try and find these characters.
To prevent the “enemy” from finding these characters, you can make other characters intercept or try and change the state of the players where their state has change before it is too late.

So this could be quite complicated and just want a gaming engine that is not too difficult to learn and capable of doing this.

Thanks

TimCS

@TimCS I think you should first check if the engines you are used to are capable of what you need. You know more about the game and the requirements than we do. What platforms? With editor (think like Construct, Unity or Unreal Engine. Sorry can't remember the correct term for it.) or without.
But if I would need to answer, try the most common ones first. Your Game idea seems pretty straight forward to realize and should be possible with most engines out there.

Here are a few free engines with integrated Scene Editors / IDE and all have Cross platform capabilities. The Cross platform Compilation/Deployment plugins may cost money.

• Unity (uses C# as a scripting language and is pretty similar to Java syntax. Easy to learn imo)
• Unreal Engine 4/5 (Has visual scripting with no programming needed with nodes you connect, but supports C++ instead of visual scripting projects too. but really big and feature packed engine and very powerful but can be difficult to learn imo)
• Gamemaker (Got its own scripting language called GML and has visual scripting too, fast to prototype with and should work for your needs and reminds me of construct. Easy to learn imo)
• Cocos Creator (based on the open source Cocos2d-x, TypeScript used for scripting. Not tested myself, but looks straight forward)
• Godot Engine (Open Source MIT licensed competitor of Unity, supports several scripting languages: C and C++ via GDNative, GDScript (similar to python) and C#. Easy to learn imo)

Here are a few without integrated Scene Editors / IDE and are only in library form. These require a lot more work to create a game with and you have to deal with programming, compilation and deployment for target platforms your self.

• raylib (C++ library for Game programming with a ton of bindings for other programming languages)
• SFML (Easy to learn C++ multimedia library not only for game development with additional support via bindings for C, C#, C++/CLI, D, Ruby, OCaml, Java, Python, VB.NET and more)
• SDL (Another C/C++ multimedia library with binding for many other programming languages)

Hi

Ultraporing said:

@TimCS I think you should first check if the engines you are used to are capable of what you need. You know more about the game and the requirements than we do. What platforms? With editor (think like Construct, Unity or Unreal Engine. Sorry can't remember the correct term for it.) or without.
But if I would need to answer, try the most common ones first. Your Game idea seems pretty straight forward to realize and should be possible with most engines out there.

Here are a few free engines with integrated Scene Editors / IDE and all have Cross platform capabilities. The Cross platform Compilation/Deployment plugins may cost money.

• Unity (uses C# as a scripting language and is pretty similar to Java syntax. Easy to learn imo)
• Unreal Engine 4/5 (Has visual scripting with no programming needed with nodes you connect, but supports C++ instead of visual scripting projects too. but really big and feature packed engine and very powerful but can be difficult to learn imo)
• Gamemaker (Got its own scripting language called GML and has visual scripting too, fast to prototype with and should work for your needs and reminds me of construct. Easy to learn imo)
• Cocos Creator (based on the open source Cocos2d-x, TypeScript used for scripting. Not tested myself, but looks straight forward)
• Godot Engine (Open Source MIT licensed competitor of Unity, supports several scripting languages: C and C++ via GDNative, GDScript (similar to python) and C#. Easy to learn imo)

Here are a few without integrated Scene Editors / IDE and are only in library form. These require a lot more work to create a game with and you have to deal with programming, compilation and deployment for target platforms your self.

• raylib (C++ library for Game programming with a ton of bindings for other programming languages)
• SFML (Easy to learn C++ multimedia library not only for game development with additional support via bindings for C, C#, C++/CLI, D, Ruby, OCaml, Java, Python, VB.NET and more)
• SDL (Another C/C++ multimedia library with binding for many other programming languages)

@Ultraporing - Thank you for you reply. Perhaps my post was not that clear, I was hoping for pointers from avid game developers which game engine to use with what I am trying to achieve for my game. There is one other point I did not mention and that is when one of the characters state changes for the “enemy” to start looking for them , I would like to make the “enemies” path to the character take longer if the difficulty is easy, slightly less longer on medium and quicker on hard.

Also I thought Game Maker 2 was at a cost? I know it can be downloaded to try out however once I want to publish the game (Android, Windows and possibly web base to start with) some of these engines require subscriptions to do this.

Thanks

TimCS

TimCS said:

… (which would be 2d) … my budget for the game engine to be free …

Defold game engine is optimized for 2D, free, with editor. It can also publish the game for Android, Windows, and web, to mention a few. It's pretty mature, King was behind it.

TimCS said:
Perhaps my post was not that clear, I was hoping for pointers from avid game developers which game engine to use with what I am trying to achieve for my game.

The thing is, I daresay that most modern engines could handle what you describe (at least as far as the description goes); none is likely to be inherently all that much better than the others, I imagine.

As a result, the best one in this case is likely to be the one that's best for you--that is, the one that is most congenial to your process and way of thinking.

To that end, my suggestion is that you download and try out a few engines, and see how you feel about them each.

Ultraporing said:
Here are a few without integrated Scene Editors / IDE and are only in library form.

Let me add to that Panda3D.

(Although there are some community-driven efforts to make scene-editors, I believe.)

It has Python bindings, but the engine itself is coded in C++ and can be used with that language, too.

Link: https://www.panda3d.org/

Thaumaturge said:

TimCS said:
Perhaps my post was not that clear, I was hoping for pointers from avid game developers which game engine to use with what I am trying to achieve for my game.

The thing is, I daresay that most modern engines could handle what you describe (at least as far as the description goes); none is likely to be inherently all that much better than the others, I imagine.

As a result, the best one in this case is likely to be the one that's best for you--that is, the one that is most congenial to your process and way of thinking.

To that end, my suggestion is that you download and try out a few engines, and see how you feel about them each.

Ultraporing said:
Here are a few without integrated Scene Editors / IDE and are only in library form.

Let me add to that Panda3D.

(Although there are some community-driven efforts to make scene-editors, I believe.)

It has Python bindings, but the engine itself is coded in C++ and can be used with that language, too.

Link: https://www.panda3d.org/

Is Panda only 3d? this game idea is going to be 2d

I am going to probably sound lazy about this however due to limit learning time, I think I will be looking at a visual scripting style game engine so far I have looked at :

• Flowlab.io
• Godot (not sure how to start using this however)

if anyone has any other suggestions it would be appreciated

TimCS said:
Is Panda only 3d? this game idea is going to be 2d

There's little stopping you from making a 2D game in Panda; while everything is technically 3D, Panda does have features that may aid in 2D development.

(I even made a little visual novel in Panda, as I recall.)

TimCS said:
… I think I will be looking at a visual scripting style game engine …

If that's a requirement, then Panda is perhaps not what you're looking for--it doesn't have a “visual scripting” tool.

Why would someone use an engine for a 2D game? We are not in 1997.

Geri said:
Why would someone use an engine for a 2D game?

An engine can offer quite a few useful features, even for a 2D game; indeed, to my mind a significant proportion of the things for which I value an engine are largely unrelated to the work being 3D, or function similarly for 2D. (e.g. input-handling, event-handling, collision, etc.)