Solar2D
Solar2D is a Lua-based game engine focused on ease of iterations and usage. As a fully open-source project forked from the well-established and widely used Corona SDK game engine, Solar2D allows developers to create applications for mobile, desktop, and connected TV devices with a single codebase, supporting platforms such as iOS, tvOS, Android, Android TV, macOS, Windows, Linux, and HTML5. The engine features an instant-update simulator, enabling developers to see code changes in real time, and supports live builds for rapid testing on real devices over a local network. A vast array of plugins is available to extend the core functionality, covering aspects like in-app advertising, analytics, and media. For additional customization, developers can call any native (C/C++/Obj-C/Java) library or API using Solar2D Native. Built on the lightweight and fast Lua scripting language, Solar2D is completely free to use, with no hidden fees, charges, or royalties.
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SpriteKit
SpriteKit is Apple's 2D game development framework that provides a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure for animating textured images, or sprites. It leverages Metal to achieve high-performance rendering and integrates seamlessly with other Apple frameworks like ARKit and SceneKit, allowing for the creation of immersive augmented reality experiences. Developers can utilize SpriteKit's scene editor within Xcode to design and preview game levels, characters, and animations, streamlining the development process. The framework also supports physics simulations, particle systems, and various special effects, enabling the creation of dynamic and interactive game environments. With its intuitive API and robust toolset, SpriteKit simplifies the development of engaging 2D games and applications across Apple's platforms.
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Cocos2d-x
Cocos2d-x is an open source, flexible, and lightweight cross-platform game engine that has been providing developers with stable and mature solutions since 2011. The engine offers interfaces in C++, Lua, and JavaScript, supporting platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and HTML5 browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Built upon OpenGL ES 2.0 and Metal for graphics rendering, Cocos2d-x fully exploits the GPU performance of mobile devices while maintaining compatibility. Developers can utilize Lua or JavaScript scripting languages to perform hot updates to games, eliminating the need to send packages to app stores and wait for review. The engine's open-source capabilities allow for extensive customization, enabling game companies to develop their own game types and extensions, including combining their own 3D engines to solve 2D interface and UI problems. According to test data, Cocos2d-x version 3.x is compatible with 99.7% of Android devices in China.
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Defold
Defold is a free and open source game engine designed for high-performance cross-platform game development. It comes fully featured out of the box, requiring no setup or configuration, allowing developers to simply download the editor and start creating. The engine includes a visual editor, code editor, Lua scripting, Lua debugger, scene editor, particle editor, and tilemap editor, and supports both 2D and 3D game development. With a single codebase and no need for external tools, Defold enables publishing to major platforms such as PlayStation5, PlayStation4, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, Windows, Steam, HTML5, and Facebook. It offers a component-based system for building games, allowing the use of basic building blocks to create complex behavior, and supports writing game logic using Lua. Developers can add new functionality from the asset portal, set up their own local build environment, and write native code to extend the engine.
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