What game engine for Android development?

Hi,

As you all know the game is better then app in terms of revenue, well mostly it is so… I’ve looked over the internet and find out dozens of game engines, which are cross platform and etc etc.
The good one with a lot of documentations and big community and a lot of ready game templates, is corona sdk. Unfortunately, you have to pay 600$ if you want to add some native library, say Google Analytics, or any library. In terms of creating game it seems too easy, but if I cant integrate Tapjoy, GA, or bug tracking service crashlytics (or any other) and need to pay 600$… that’s way too much for me.
Unity3D – now it is free, but 3d for newbie is damned hard… and the community is not so big, and not too many tutorials. but free)
ProjectAnarchy – which is also 3d, but it is too new, people still have complains on bugs and etc things. I keep an eye on this engine, but it would be something to be used in the future. So, it is great as it uses Havok engine… but not good for me so far.

There are andengine or libgdx, which some of you already started to think about, but they seems difficult, but most people like them.
So, which of them you think is good?
What terminologies, or concepts do I need to know to start understanding the games? and how they work.

P.S: I would like to have something like corona sdk, which doesnt have limits on native libraries and have big community, so when you stuck somewhere, there will be a forum that will help you.

I’m use libgdx for every game. It’s great, people say that it is low-level, hard, etc. but it’s not so true. I started to using it without any knowledge about opengl and game development at all and I think that it was good choice even for first game engine/framework. Andengine may be a bit easier itself but libgdx has much better documentation and community support what makes libgdx more noob-friendly at all in my opinion.

About P.S.:
MOAI SDK ( Moai SDK | Develop Great Cross-platform Games, Fast. ) uses Lua and you compile it from native sources so you may add your native code. Free version had requirement for splash screen if I remember well and it is good only for simple games, cos it quickly runs into performance problems when you have too much calling / logic code in Lua, so I wrote my own Lua port of libgdx based on https://github.com/aevum/libgdx-cpp , but I’m sure that you are not interested in something without support xd You may try generate Lua bindings for cpp port.

We used libgdx for our first 2 games, Lights of the Atlantis and another one we are releasing in 2 weeks. It is a very good engine, ideal for people who are beginning with android games like us. But we feel we should take the next step to make profesional games so we are going to use Unity3d for our next game… We´ll see how that goes hehe

libGDX is awesome, they have great documentation and community support. It’s cross platform, html5, desktop, android, ios (not all things working for ios yet). Here’s a video tutorial on getting started with libGDX Libgdx Setup Tutorial - YouTube

I had a look at libgdx. the very first thing I wanted to do was throw up a opengl window inside some other XML as part of an activity. I could not figure out how. Apparently it can be done, but I could not find any docs.

AndEngine docs showed how to do it and it worked first time… so, YMMV.

Yeah, so libgdx… Thanks all for your answers)

@mind
It’s easy like with any Android View, but have to be done from code and it’s in docs labeled as admob integration (maybe that’s why you didn’t find it): https://code.google.com/p/libgdx/wiki/AdMobInLibgdx

Anyway if you have any problem just ask on libgdx forum and it will be solved.

I am starting to dev game, I read about Coco2d and cocos2dx, but it’s seem quite hard.

Never really like andengine, seemed too clunky to me. Libdgx seemed to elegant and smooth and its probably one of the best performing 2d for android imo.

Unity for android is decent as well. Even though the 2d for it is terrible (I think they did a bench mark, it could push out 1/10 of the polygons of libdgx or equivalent) a lot of big companies use it. For instance Bad piggies is Unity, so is Triple town.

Some very popular games use libGDX too. I don’t remember their names though, so not as big as Bad piggies though. :wink: