Let’s put aside high-budget AAA games and talk about casual and mid-core games that have the highest market share at the moment. These games include platformers, puzzles, point-and-click games, farms, simple real-time strategies, and many others. We see them in app stores on smartphones and tablets, on social networks and new mobile all-in-one VR devices – Facebook Oculus Go and Oculus Quest. These games can also be found on top game consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox.
Developing games for this huge market does not imply you’ll have to choose a programming language and build your own engine. Instead, it implies the development using existing engines and development tools.
If you decide to develop a game without tons of animation and graphic effects for iOS or Android platforms, then you should probably choose between native development tools, such as:
- Xcode (written in the Swift programming language)
- Android Studio (written in Java and Kotlin programming languages)
In this case, you’ll get the app with the smallest possible size and the smoothest interface based on Apple and Google design guidelines. These games include quizzes, some puzzles, sports management simulations, etc.
Native development platforms are intuitive since they have ready-made tools for project implementation using machine learning, AR, and VR.
In all other cases, we recommend using the Unity Engine (written in the C# programming language). Unity had quite strong and promising rivals a few years ago, but now it has become an undisputed leader.
Why do we recommend Unity? Because it stays on top of new technologies and supports porting projects to all relevant platforms. Whether you are working on a small 2D game or developing a 3D project using AR/VR, Unity will provide you with all the necessary tools for bringing your ideas to life.
Read also: 12 Ways to Come Up with Great Mobile Game Ideas
The main pros of Unity are the store of assets, templates (so that developers do not have to reinvent the wheel), large community, a considerable number of qualified specialists, the constant system development, and pricing.
Unity is also convenient for game artists, designers, project managers, and product owners. The visual studio game development (WYSIWYG) allows you to check the result in real-time even before launching the app on the final platform. Unity has a fairly low entry threshold, and game designers can customize gameplay directly in the project without distracting the team from the main workflow.
Once again, we are not talking about AAA blockbuster games now, although even here Unity is a perfect choice. But that would be another story with different approach, deadlines, budget, and team background.
Planning to create your own mobile game? Read our full guide on mobile game development.
This article was originally published on g2.com
