Common Game Development Tools Used in Mobile Technology

Gamification is a trend that has taken the digital world by storm, and its impact has exponentially climbed over the past few years. Mobile developers use their expertise and skills to build high quality games on diverse mobile platforms. They use several game development tools to build masterpieces. Unity 2D/3D, Visual Studio 2013 Xamarin, and Cocos2d-X (Cocos2d –Obj C, Cocos2d-Python, Cocos-XNA, Cocos-HTML) are a few of them.

Unity 2/3D, Cocos2d and Xamarin are cross-platform application development framework. All of them have several exceptional features that make them a preferred choice of mobile developers for gamification. To know more about different gaming development tools, let’s dive into their details:

Unity Game Engine: It supports both 3D and 2D game development, and use C as well as C++ as development languages. VR & AR Development are a new era of technology. Both virtual reality and augmented reality aims to engage the user, but in different ways. In AR, users remain connected with the real world while interacting with virtual objects around them, whereas in VR, the user is isolated from the real world while engaging them to the fabricated world. Mobile developers perform augmented reality in mobile app via Unity and Vuforia sdk/ARtoolkit. Unity has introduced built-in support for certain VR devices, such as Oculus family, Gear VR, etc. This game engine constitutes of several exceptional features, like:

• 1. Unity game engine has a very strong community of asset and plugin creators.
• 2. Its visual editing tools are outstanding and the editor can be stretched with plugins.
• 3. Developed several famous games, including monument valley, Temple Run 2, Angry Birds Epic.
• 4. The minimum size of game developed is around 8MB.
• 5. It supports diverse asset formats and converts automatically to best formats for the target platform.
• 6. It supports various platforms, mobile, desktop, Android, Apple TV, BlackBerry 10, iOS, Linux, Nintendo 3DS line, OS X, PlayStation Vita, Unity Web Player, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii, Wii U, Windows Phone 8, Windows, Xbox 360, and Xbox One
• 7. Easy to manage deployment to multiple platforms.
• 8. The 3D engine gives high quality results without any complex configuration.
• 9. There is a free license, covering most of the features. Also, paid licenses are not too pricey.

Cocos2d game engine: It is a free and open source option for mobile games. There are several versions of Cocos2d available in Objective-C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript and Ruby. Mobile developers go for this cutting edge platform due to its outstanding characteristics like:

• 1. It supports an extensive range of supported platforms, like Android, Tizen, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS.
• 2. C++ is mainly used for development.
• 3. The minimum game size developed can be as low as 1.5MB.
• 4. Many popular games, such as 2048, BADLAND are developed.
• 5. Audio support (in most versions).
• 6. Huge array of extensions, tools and open source code available.
• 7. Free and open source (MIT license).
• 8. Hardware accelerated graphics and good performance.

Xamarin apps: This cross-platform enables developers to create applications for iOS and Android with C# and .NET libraries. The developers use the complete native APIs spectrum and user interface controls provided by the basic operating system and hardware. Xamarin creates individual UIs for each device, like iOS and Android, but shares the common core application code across all of them. The developers create UI using Xamarin Studio, which allows them to test the UI on multiple screen resolutions and orientations. It has several features, including:

• 1. You can develop complete application, but not the graphics. Provide graphics by external resource.
• 2. Cross-platform support.
• 3. You can import FBX or other 3D.

Mobile games are today one of the highest grossing mediums. It’s for this reason more and more companies are investing in it. You never know when your game could be the next Candy Crush or Pokemon Go. So, have a great game idea? Want to see it on the mobile screens and increase your revenue or branding? Get in touch with a proficient developer who can make an engaging mobile game out of your idea on varied platforms.