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Comment by aplummer | Hacker News Reader

I'm really interested if anyone has advice on the best cross platform 2d focused game engine?

Godot is great. Full editor, it has it's own 2D bone animation system(!), own scripting language (very easy to pick up - Python-esque with simple semantics - you can program in it without really knowing it because there's not much to know) and it deploys to pretty much every target you can think of (it's written in C++ with very few dependencies).

My answer will of course be biased, since I work on Defold.

But if you are going for a 2D game, I think Defold is a really good choice. We support Android, iOS, desktop (Win, OSX and Linux) and HTML5. We try to solve all the icky platform specific stuff for you. And to start coding you only need to download the editor, there is no development environment to set up.

Are you doing fancy 3D stuff, then Unity will probably be better, currently. :)

I've liked Corona SDK, though multiple recent ownership changes does leave me uneasy. The creators of Crashlands swear by Game Maker, but I wouldn't go there if you have any kind of programming experience already as the UI will just be in your way all the time. While Unity is accepted as best for 3D, many devs love it for 2D with the right libraries.

Unity is the most popular engine at the moment. Saying that it is the best is going a bit far. I actually think that Unity is one of the best 2D engines available. For 3D the tools are really broken for production use, and Unity is quite unresponsive about fixing them. And the renderer quality is a bit of a far cry from CryEngine or Unreal Engine, but is getting there bit by bit. Except that those two are also progressing, mostly by doing actual new research in the field.

Still, new 2D engines are welcome as Unity still has the 3D package to work with in a 2D game.

Thanks for the input peops

Unity.

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