2d game engines/sdks

I use cocos2dx which is a mobile engine but also supports desktop. I find it easy to have one game be on iOS, Android, Win32, OSX and Linux all at once. Just abstract all the platform specific code out and use ifdef's when needed.

I use cocos2dx which is a mobile engine but also supports desktop. I find it easy to have one game be on iOS, Android, Win32, OSX and Linux all at once. Just abstract all the platform specific code out and use ifdef's when needed.

That does look really good, thanks!

Believe or not, GameMaker Studio does really well. For 2d game creation, the only thing that really beats it(except for very special situations) would be coding your own, but then you lose out on the portability. For 3d(which you say you don't need) Unity would likely be king, but Unity's 2d just doesn't yet get close to GameMaker Studio. It also exports to mobile platforms, but the desktop exports are great too. You also have most access that you would need to lower level parts, enough to do almost anything you want, but nothing that gets in your way. For example, if you want to use custom shaders for rendering, even for 2d, even if it is the whole screen at once, you can do it. But if that doesn't interest you, there is no need at all to mess with shaders.

I'm gonna advertise the technology our company is using right now to make social games. It is called Starling. Utilizes high-level programming language - ActionScript 3. Free. Works on Mobile and Desktop with minimum efforts per platform (basically 99% of the code is the same for every platform). GPU-accelerated.

Believe or not, GameMaker Studio does really well. For 2d game creation, the only thing that really beats it(except for very special situations) would be coding your own, but then you lose out on the portability. For 3d(which you say you don't need) Unity would likely be king, but Unity's 2d just doesn't yet get close to GameMaker Studio. It also exports to mobile platforms, but the desktop exports are great too. You also have most access that you would need to lower level parts, enough to do almost anything you want, but nothing that gets in your way. For example, if you want to use custom shaders for rendering, even for 2d, even if it is the whole screen at once, you can do it. But if that doesn't interest you, there is no need at all to mess with shaders.

This looks great, I'm leaning on going this route. A friend recommended it 3 years or so ago but at the time, it didn't support nearly as many platforms or have any real multiplayer (UDP sockets) support. Now it looks much more polished. The only downside is the IDE is Windows only, ideally the IDEA could work on Mac OS X too but that is ok (my laptop is Mac, home desktop is Windows). But it looks like a great platform.. probably I'll go this route.

I'm gonna advertise the technology our company is using right now to make social games. It is called Starling. Utilizes high-level programming language - ActionScript 3. Free. Works on Mobile and Desktop with minimum efforts per platform (basically 99% of the code is the same for every platform). GPU-accelerated.

This one looks really good too, but I didn't see any networking (UDP Sockets) support in a quick look through the API.

Thanks!

This one looks really good too, but I didn't see any networking (UDP Sockets) support in a quick look through the API.

Thanks!

Since Starling is just a library for Air/Flex SDK, it has access to everything those platforms from Adobe can offer. Including http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/net/DatagramSocket.html and much much more.

This one looks really good too, but I didn't see any networking (UDP Sockets) support in a quick look through the API.

Thanks!

Since Starling is just a library for Air/Flex SDK, it has access to everything those platforms from Adobe can offer. Including http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/net/DatagramSocket.html and much much more.

Thanks!