As a lot of people know, LD31 is right around the corner, and I'm going to enter it for the first time.
I'm getting pretty excited about it and I hope the theme will be a good one this time, although it's not looking so good with the Snow Man in the vote. But if it gets voted, I'm going to make the best of it and just go with it.
I'm not really sure what to expect when going into this, but I do think I have some idea. When I have been playing around making some minor games before, I have been using c++ and SDL, but I figured that for most exposure with my LD game I should go with a HTML5 game engine. because then with much ease, everyone should be able to play. Although it does have some drawbacks. But that's going to be fine... I hope.
I only started looking into at HTML5 Game engines last weekend, but it was easy enough to find a lot of strong contenders. I have tested loads, but here are the top 5 FOR ME. I want to make it clear that these 5 are not necessarily the best 5 engines out there. these are just the 5 that I really liked, or remember (Or want to share my thoughts on).
#5 - ImpactJS
ImpactJS was actually the first engine I tested while deciding on what engine to use because I already had a license for it. I had never used it before, actually not even tried it. Just had it for some reason.
ImpactJS Is a seasoned engine and it seems to be pretty popular, but while looking more into it, I felt that it could be a bit better. The price of it is $99 and I don't feel people are really getting their moneys worth with this engine.
Although It has everything people could ask for in a HTML5 engine, it seems a bit outdated and that the performance is not at it's best. Although I might be wrong, and this engine might be better than I thought and I'm using it wrong, but no matter, It's just not the one for me this LD.
#4 - Turbulenz
This engine looks pretty good and I actually wanted to use it, but there was a "minor" problem, and that is that it does not work so good when developing on a linux machine. And although canvas is nice, WebGL is nicer, and I wanted a tool that can utilize that.So thats really the only reason for why I'm not going for this one.
#3 - CreateJS
This one is pretty good, and I tested it just a little bit with the Box2d physics engine.I don't really have anything special to say about it, I just wanted to have it on this list. I didn't look that much into it as I kind off wanted a complete game engine.
I will definitely look more into this later, but I didn't choose it this time around.
#2 - PixiJS
I tested this one with several different physics engines, but somehow the work-flow didn't feel quiet right. I have considered that that might be because I only started testing these last weekend and this one is definitely going on the "Check back later" list, because It's super fast and looks really promising.
Honourable mentions
Before I let you know what engine I'm going for I wanted to add the name of some engines that are of course amazing, but all lack one thing. The engines are GameMaker, Construct, Unity3D, Unreal Engine.These are all fantastic engines that I have tried at some point in time, but the problem is... That I'm a linux user. And none of these run on linux. That's really the only downside. I would have considered them more, but I'm not going to install Windows for it... And I would gladly pay for these services, but not unless they support Linux.
I really don't understand why they don't support it, or seem to have it on their radar. More and more people are using Linux these days, and I think they could really profit on porting their engines to Linux.And now...
#1 - Phaser
The engine I'm going for is Phaser, It's good and it has everything I need. And it's easy to use.I don't have anything special to say about Phaser really, other than I'm going to use it and that it is good. I'm going to post my game here when I'm done and I write something about Phaser then, but until then, your just going to have to check out this engine yourself. And I do recommend that you do, if you haven’t. And that's it for now... If you read this then I would like to thank you for doing so.
And if you have anything to say, feel free to comment down here. And if you do, just remember that these are just my thoughts and opinions and that there is no right or wrong in this.
