What’s Next? - Beginning Android Games - page 670

In the end, it's a matter of personal taste, budget, and goals. As independent developers, we
prefer frameworks because they are usually easier to understand and because they let us do
things in the exact way we want them to be done.
With that said, choose your poison. Here's a list of frameworks and engines that can speed up
your development process:
ï?® Unreal Development Kit ( www.udk.com ) : A commercial game engine running
on a multitude of platforms, developed by Epic Games. Epic made games
such as Unreal Tournament, so this engine is quality stuff. It uses its own
scripting language.
ï?® Unity ( http://unity3d.com ): Another commercial game engine with great
tools and functionality. It, too, works on a multitude of platforms, including
iOS and Android, or in the browser. It is easy to learn, and allows a couple of
languages for coding the game logic; Java is not among them.
ï?® jPCT - AE ( www.jpct.net/jpct-ae/ ): A port of the Java-based jPCT engine for
Android. It has some great features with regard to 3D programming. It works
on the desktop and on Android. Closed source.
ï?® Ardor3D ( www.ardor3d.com ) : A very powerful Java-based 3D engine. It
works on Android and on the desktop, and is open source with great
documentation.
ï?® libGDX ( http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com ): An open source, Java-based
game development framework by Mario Zechner for 2D and 3D games. It
works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, HTLM5, iOS, and Android without
any code modifications. You can develop and test on the desktop without
needing to attach a device and upload your APK file (or having to use the
slow emulator). You'll probably feel right at home after having read this
book—it's all part of our evil plan. Did you notice that this bullet point is just
slightly bigger than the rest?
ï?® Slick - AE ( http://slick.cokeandcode.com ) : A port of the Java-based Slick
framework to Android, built on top of libgdx. It has tons of functionality and
an easy-to-use API for 2D game development. Cross platform and open
source, of course.
ï?® AndEngine ( www.andengine.org ) : A nice Java-based, Android-only 2D
engine, partially based on libgdx code (open source for the win). It's similar
in concept to the famous cocos2d game development engine for iOS.
ï?® BatteryTech SDK ( www.batterypoweredgames.com/batterytech ): An open
source commercial library in C++ that supports cross-platform game code
and officially supports Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac OS X as build
targets.
ï?® Moai ( http://getmoai.com ): Another open source commercial library in C++
that targets Android and iOS with cross-platform game code.
ï?® Papaya's Social Game Engine ( http://papayamobile.com/developer/engine ) :
A free Android-exclusive 2D game engine that includes a physics API,
OpenGL support, particle effects, and more.