5 Top Essential Tools For Mobile Game Development

The worldwide gaming industry is almost valued at $128.5 billion by the year 2020 with smartphone acquiring half of the market share. With some of the innovative technologies like AR(Augmented Reality) and VR(Virtual Reality) in the scene, these predictions are likely to go in the favor of the smartphone industry. Mobile technology has changed rapidly over the past few years. Innovation in game development has so many limitations. They are like limited storage, heating issues, battery issues, processing limitations etc. all are being either restored or at least they have been improved dramatically.

All of these predictions and metrics have made mobile game development worth of investment. Many new companies are adopting gaming in hope of a big win for them. While all these trends show a positive mobile game development market, but it is not easy for someone to get in this industry. Especially the ones who are from a non-technical background who don’t know about the technical details involved in game development.

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In this post, we will discuss top 5 tools for mobile game development which is currently used by most of the game development companies globally.

1.Lumberyard

Lumberyard is built-in with Twitch which is the live video gaming streaming service and has a wide user base every month. The Lumberyard engine has developed games like New World, Breakaway, Star Citizen etc.

Lumberyard is based on CryEngine architecture, it is free game development engine by Amazon. It provides so many free tools and cross-platform functionalities to develop high-quality games. The greatest benefit of using Lumberyard is that you don’t need to share your profits with Amazon. You can host multiplayer games using AWS cloud infrastructure as it comes built-in with Amazon Web Services.

2. Corona SDK

Corona SDK runs on the rendering engine called OpenGL. It has built-in scene transition and management library to help in adjusting and modifying graphic qualities of a game. FOr making the game development easier, Corona Labs provide Corona Editor and Text plugin. Moreover, you can create a graphical environment for designing different levels and understanding the interaction between various objects. It is an ideal tool if you are looking to develop mobile games for cross-platform.

3. Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine is the mobile game engine developed by Epic Games. Its game development kit comes with so many options for smartphones, PCs as well as gaming consoles. Unreal Engine contains stunning graphical capabilities like particle system and advanced dynamic lightning which can handle up to million particles in one scene simultaneously. It is definitely a treat for 3D game developers.

There is a charge for every month for using Unreal Engine services. It costs $19 per month and 5% royalty when the game is shipped. This royalty only applies if the earning of the game exceeds $3000 per quarter. Other than, developing games for mobile, PC, and consoles. Unreal Engine comes with tools for AR(Augmented Reality) and VR(Virtual Reality) for mobile game development.

4. Unity

Unity is one of the popular mobile game development engines which supports UnityScript which is Unity’s own language similar to JavaScript and C#. It comes with free as well as professional editions. It is a cross-platform tool and can be deployed to other platforms as well. Like other tools, it has a built-in editor which allows you to edit images and organize animation from animation window. Particle System can also be designed in the Unity editor.

It has its own physics engine and provides an inbuilt camera for simple navigation in the gaming world. Unity has unique user interface having different components to easily view its features. Unity is an ideal choice if you want to develop a game for a wide range of devices. The unity also provides the asset store where you can purchase the required assets for your game.

5. Cocos2D

Cocos2D is an open-source mobile game development engine. It works both with Objective-C and Swift and supports Mac OS and iOS. If coding is done in Objective-C and supports Android using Spritebuilder Android plugin. Spritebuilder is used for creating new projects and providing design environment where you can prototype and develop games.

Like many mobile game development tools, Cocos2D has OpenGL as the rendering engine. So if you are looking to develop games on multiple platforms and like Objective-C and Swift, Cocos2D is an outstanding framework.

Read More:- Top 10 Web Frameworks In 2018

Final Note

In this post, we learned and explored about some of the most popular mobile game development tools, frameworks and engines being preferred by developers these days. You can easily compare and have the better insights about which mobile game solution is best suited to your requirement.