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List of Game Platforms

In this course you can choose freely what game development platform you use as long as it is a dedicated platform for developing games, i.e. not simply a programming language standard library such as Java FX or C# WPF. Depending on your game project you need things like scene management, collision handing, sprite or 3D model handling with animation support, physics engines, AI and so forth. Implementing these things yourself is not really an option, it will take you to long and you will perhaps focus on the wrong things. Reusing technologies is something valued in the course. I can guarantee you that in 95% of the cases you will get much further if you spend some time educating yourself on the game tech that will help you reach the goals of your game than building it yourself.

We will support with assistants XNA Game Studio.

During scheduled lab times we will have assistans supporting development in XNA Game Studio which is a C# game development for PC, Microsoft Phone and XBOX.

Here I will also note some additional game engines but since there is an enormous amount of alternatives out there I think you should only view this as a potential starting point, not conclusive and not a list of guaranteed problem-free platforms.

  • http://www.scirra.com/construct2. HTML5 game environment. Good integration with JS. Free version a little limited with regards to events. Dont mix events and physics on the same tasks.
  • Gamesalad - IOS publising point-click developer that used to be only for Mac but now also on Windows.
  • http://www.panda3d.org/ - very stable and functional 3D enviroment for python
  • http://www.stencyl.com/ - iOS and Flash point and click enviromnet.
  • http://www.haxenme.org/showcase - HAXE-based cross-platform development enviroment for games
  • http://unity3d.com/ - commersial platform
  • http://www.blender.org/ - complete gameing enviroment bur requires you to learn blender and has no realy strong commersial distribution tech.
  • http://www.unrealengine.com/udk/ - really strong, really complex, free for non commerisal and very nice commersial license. Time consuming.
  • http://jmonkeyengine.com/ - really good Java 3D game enviroment.
  • http://www.lwjgl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Game_Engines_and_Libraries_Using_LWJGL - SLICK 2D is a good Java enviement.
  • http://getmoai.com/ - new and upcomming cross-platform alternative with Lua.
  • http://www.melonjs.org/ - full JS enviromnet.
  • On JavaScript: check out things like: http://www.html5gamedevelopment.org/html5-engines, http://www.createjs.com/#!/CreateJS, https://github.com/chandlerprall/Physijs, http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/ - to make your own JS combination. But remember to collect as much technologies you need to ensure your focusing on implementing the game and not the platform or game engine.
  • http://code.google.com/p/playn/ - interesting cross-platform enviroment but I down really know the status.
  • http://gaming.adobe.com/ If you want to check out what Adobe is doing. They do a lot, supporting open source implementation and are also in the process of moving along to HTML5 and do deliver content to iOS without flash so it is still very relevant.

    • Page responsible: Erik Berglund
    Last updated: 2012-09-03