Is mobile gaming anything more that just an entertaining distraction or can we take it seriously? As trivial as it may initially appear to be, the mobile game development industry is now a thriving business that has earned as much as $71.3 billion in 2018. This figure includes app purchase and subscription fees, with mobile gaming accounting for more than 76% of revenue. With hits like Pokemon GO, Candy Crush Saga, Fortnite, Toon Blast and ROBLOG bringing millions in yearly earnings, it’s clear that the industry is rapidly maturing.
Tech advancements, such as fast processing speeds, unlimited data plans offered by mobile operators and advanced graphics have made mobile gaming more engaging. On top of that, the emergence of sophisticated mobile development platforms has accelerated the industry growth. Building your own mobile game and publishing it to reap revenues is now easier than ever. Below is an overview of mobile game development engines and platforms favored by professional developers.
Corona SDK: this software development kit has a vast community of supporters.
It offers a free basic version and is a popular choice for creating 2D games for Windows and OS X, and a range of mobile platforms as well as Apple TV and Android TV. Corona SDK uses Lua scripting language, often preferred by developers because it’s relatively lightweight and simple. To create something more advanced, though, you will have to pay for additional features: as of today, the monthly price for enterprise solution is $79 with even more sophisticated version available for $199 per month.
Corona SDK has over 500 APIs offering a plethora of functions, and enables you to test, animate and code on the go. One of the main downsides is its focus solely on 2D development. This software development kit won’t support 3D and AR/VR.
SpriteKit: SpriteKit is a proprietary Apple framework for 2D mobile game development that uses Swift and Objective-C programming languages. SpriteKit is available on iOS and OS X will run on on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. The suite is a great choice for Apple developers. Targeted not only at creating games but also other graphics-intensive apps, SpriteKit offers an extensive library of animations and physics behaviors which create smooth and graceful user experiences, and uses Metal API for rendering. The framework supports OpenGL ES shaders and lighting and integrates with SceneKit, which helps create advanced animations and lighting effects.
Unity: favored by many developers and featured in our previous overview, Unity is a cross-platform game development tool tailored for creating both 2D and 3D games. The framework combines excellent image editing interface with top-notch coding capabilities (you can code in C# or in a proprietary language called Unity Script), and uses Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, so code analysis and debugging are as easy and breeze.
Unity is loaded with a huge number of features, and has notably non-intuitive interface. Despite long learning curve, this platform enables developers to create truly complex and captivating games, and is used by a vast majority of mobile game developers. Its basic version is free, but there is a number of feature rich versions available on a paid basis. Unity 3D engine integrates seamlessly with VARTEQ Festi Cloud platform, so, if you’re creating a social multiplayer game and need powerful backend, you’re all set.
Unreal Engine: another professional game development platform, Unreal Engine has gained wide recognition among the professional developers. Intended for creating 2D games as well as immersive 3D games, this framework publishes to a number of platforms, including mobile. A range of ready templates for various game genres and types (adventure, RPG, educational, ect) and rich number of assets make it a 1# choice for many game developers. It has convenient UI, with a simple drag and drop feature enabling you to easily place elements into a game. It’s coding language is C++, which is quite complex, so some will list this among the platform’s downsides. The default IDE is Microsoft Visual Studio, but you can integrate it with other development environment, if you need to.
The nicest thing about Unreal Engine is that the platform will only charge royalties if your game becomes a big commercial hit. As long as your monthly earnings stay below $3000, you can use Unreal Engine for free.
Amazon Lumberyard: another cross-platform mobile game development engine, which comes almost free of charge (apart from certain features). Developed by Amazon and based on CryEngine architecture, it is an excellent tool for developing AAA games. Released in 2018, Lumberyard supports 3D and lets you create realistic immersive environments. The framework features weather effects, cloth physics, particle editor, UI editor. On top of that, even if your game becomes a blockbuster, Amazon won’t ask for any share in revenues and will let you host your game on AWS cloud. Amazon will charge for hosting an online multiplayer game, though.
Other perks of using Amazon Lumberyard for mobile game development include its integration with Twitch, a live video game streaming platform, which facilitates its promotion and marketing and gives instant access to the community of gamers.
Gaming is even more fun with multiplayer option for creating interactive experiences. If you’re building a mobile game for multiple players, you will need a solid backend. Unless you’re using Amazon Lumberyard as your game development engine, we recommend using Festi Cloud Platform as a backend solution you can easily use for support and development.
With in-built backend modules, Festi Cloud Platform will rid you of repetitive tasks and significantly enhance your development speed. The platform offers a turn-based game service, push-messaging to manage communication between players, data history storage, leaderboards for analysing player performance, game script scheduler, in App purchase option and more.
On top of that, Festi Cloud Platform will integrate with best game engines, including Unity 3D. You’ll never know unless you try, so contact us to request a free trial now.