You’re developing a game. How do you choose the best APIs for your project?

There are many different APIs to develop a game and each API individually sets a game's limitations and expectations of development from the start. I am personally using DirectX12 Ultimate for my upcoming game Cognac Metaverse, it's a PC recommended API for modern games that require modern graphics and extreme performance. I have heard about Vulkan and DX11 which was the predecessor to DX12 but I have never used them much personally. But here's what one should know: before even starting to develop a game one must consider which API to choose for their intended platform and their intended purpose. This can be done by comparing APIs pros and cons. Vulkan in recent years was supported mostly by AMD GPUs as much as I remember.

Select APIs that cater to your specific needs, such as pathfinding for real-time strategy games or character customization for role-playing games. Prioritize APIs that optimize performance and support features relevant to your target platform, whether it's mobile, PC, or console. By aligning your API choices with your game's genre and platform, you can ensure efficient development and an optimal player experience.

Well APIs are used for all different sorts of purposes ranging from graphical rendering to cloud infrastructure, player server travelling, translation and realtime data processing in any way is mostly relied on APIs. When we talk about graphical rendering we refer to APIs such as DX12, DX12 Ultimate, Vulkan etc. When we talk about multiplayer and singleplayer games we are talking about the APIs that make the player session travel possible over the cloud to different fleets and instances. These include APIs such as Amazon's web services, Photon, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud's and many others that work in very different ways and methods when compared. However for singleplayer games we don't require any cloud API. I believe this helps.

Weighing different APIs and services becomes very clear when game devs come to know the costs of running a game over cloud services rendered by third party companies. Devs using Unreal engine mostly used Steam API or Epic Games Services APIs that are easy to integrate and expand upon in the long run. Even though it's hard to grasp the information at first glance. Devs purposely targeting mobile markets may opt for Google Play services for achievement calculations, ranking etc. Facebook SDK and Google SDK are generally used in games for login and sign up etc. As I always tell, for each and every different purpose there are many different APIs but the choice becomes clear when we see the future expansibility, costs and freedom as dev.

Different APIs sets the limits and expectations of games such as most high performance games like Cognac Metaverse opt for DX12 Ultimate. Developers might sometimes compile their games for different APIs at the same time. Such as some game engines allow to compile a game that's compatible with DX12 and Vulkan at the same time for an example. Game engines like UE also allows devs to compile bundled Android packages supporting many different APIs and software versions of device in just a single optimised package that can be optimised for all versions of intended platforms in a single development cycles, saving developers time and hassle of going throught the same process of launch and development many times. I believe this will help.