2D Game Dev: Tools for Getting Started

[tofos]

At first glance Construct 2 has more user friendly GUI. But I'll dig Gdev deeper!

[Ulnarevern]

I don't know since I never tried Construct
But from what I remember, Construct is great for beginners but GDevelop offers a much bigger versatility

[tofos]

I must admit that Gdev is waaaay more flexible. Bye, bye Construct Thanks @Ulnarevern!

[bscotchAdam]

As you've probably seen us declare on many occasions: we use GameMaker for our stuff. It has drag-and-drop (coding-free) capabilities, but does also let you code for real in a pretty straightforward (though sometimes constrained way). Seth learned how to program by slowly moving away from drag-and-drop in GameMaker, and that way he didn't have to go from a pure code-free environment to a pure-code environment, and could learn at a gradual pace. And you'll definitely want to let yourself get into coding as quickly as possible: it frees you to be able to do anything. We don't use drag-drop at all anymore, because everything that can be done in drag-and-drop can be done more precisely and better with raw code!

As for animation. Sam makes the art assets so that animated items are broken into as few sprites as possible, and then Seth animates the sprites purely through code. You can get away with a lot of fake animation, and thus use even a single sprite for uncomplicated items, by stretching sprites if your dev platform can easily do that.

[Ulnarevern]

@tofos You're welcome!

GDevelop is indeed really efficient for everything (you can do a lot of stuff to your sprites) as long as you want to stay away from coding by yourself.
I'm not sure but there still may be some coding stuff available. But I can't affirm or deny :/

[tofos]

All right, boys and girls. I did a little research and here's what I found (chronologically):

Construct2
With Construct2 you can make games within 2 hours even if you're totally newbie.
+ Really simple and user friendly GUI
+ Great manuals
+ Great community
+ Great free trial version
+ No coding required
- Not sure if you can code here
- Not that flexible like Game Maker or GDevelop

GDevelop
+ Totally free (Open Source)
+ More flexible than Construct2
+ Great but really small community (I've meet only two superusers)
+ No coding required
- Not sure if you can code here
- Really buggy (it crashes with absolutely no reason)
- Poor quality (weird things happened in my simple game with only two sprites, about 20 instances, and only few actions)
- Poor documentation
- GUI could be much simpler

Unity
I've had a few approaches to Unity, but it's too advanced for me...

LOVE 2D
Coding only, but you can make your game in only few lines of code! Really!
+ Totally free (Open Source)
+ Really easy to learn language
- Coding only
- Poor documentation (404 errors in wiki)
- You can build your games only for Windows, Linux and MAC OS
- Looks like it's abandoned project

Game Salad
Installed, opened, closed, uninstalled. It wasn't a love at the first sight.

Game Maker
The greatest game making engine I've ever met!
+ Great fusion of coding and drag'n drop programming
+ Great manuals
+ Great free trial version (however you can build games only for Windows)
- Ekhm.... a little expensive (it's totally worth the price but it's still a lot if you're only a games enthusiast)

Corona SDK
I can't say much about it, but it looks very promising. The only thing is that you have to learn to code. And this is what I want to focus on now.
+ Totally Free (if you don't need native APIs)
+ Great documentation
- Coding only (there is a GUI but only for MAC users)

[Ulnarevern]

Wow nice list!

About GDevelop, yeah there is a random bug I had once. Probably a weird operation the software can't handle. You might need to restart your game or something and change your approach to the programming side.
But I think your mind is made up on Game Maker ?

[tofos]

I will buy Game Maker someday for sure! But for now, it's Corona. I want to code hard!

[Ulnarevern]

Good luck then!

[tofos]

Thanks!