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Comment by notagamedev | Hacker News Reader

How timely! I've just started looking into game development and more specifically Godot today. I'm not exactly sure how I should proceed if my intention is to make something like Flappy bird for both Android and iOS - Would Godot be overkill? Should I try to make it with Flutter or React Native (or would those two be even more overkill)? What size would be too big for it?

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Something like Flappy Bird is easily done in Godot and can help you learn the engine. I for one really like Godot and look forward to using it for many of my game projects. You'll really like the node system once you get into it. Look on YouTube for tutorials, there's quite a few.

Thanks!

Check out Corona (https://coronalabs.com/). It’s a pretty straightforward 2d engine with support for many platforms. Games are written in lua which isn’t hard to learn if you’re already familiar with JS.

This is not the right time to give someone Corona.

I'm not saying they should change their name, but maybe lay low for awhile.

Corona Labs is shutting down in a couple of weeks. While they're releasing everything under a permissive license (MIT) and turning it into an open source project, the future is very uncertain.

the lead developer of the engine is continuing and has support on github to continue the development.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Almost anything will work to make something as simple as the bird games, so don't worry too much.

Even moving HTML elements with CSS animations triggered by Lua compiled to JS would probably work fast enough...

PS: don't do that, don't create a monster!

You can trigger the CSS animations from a Lua interpreter written in JavaScript :) https://fengari.io/

I am crossing my fingers for a nice, cuddly monster! And thanks!

last I looked at it a few years ago, Cocos2D was a pretty good balance between powerful and newbie-friendly. The tutorial started from the basics of what makes a game program and built up from there. Quite a nice engine for 2D stuff.

For cross-platfrom 2D (not mobile, but Windows, Mac, Linux) I recommend looking at Love2D

https://love2d.org/

Easy to use, good documentation, simple API, based off Lua. I suspect it's meant for smaller projects.

Actually, Love2D is for used mobile as well. Both android and iOS is supported and there are community ports for other platforms

Thanks!

Your output artifact will be larger with godot than with gideros. I really like the node scene system in godot though. I'd flip a coin (especially if you are new to programming :)).

Thanks!

If you just started game developement, and your intended game is simple, I would just use plain javascript, html elements for UI, audio and canvas and consider everything else overkill. ChromeDevTools are a very powerful IDE nowdays, but simple enough, that you can just use the debugger, without setting anything up.

Very simple, but so you learn the basic concepts, without getting side tracked in millions and millions of different libaries and tools.

And if you do things right, your game will then run anywhere, where a modern browser works.

There's value in using the right tools for the job. Making games with plain javascript is HARD, there is too much complexity as the environment is simply designed for a different use case.

There's much to learn in game development on itself, so using a dedicated library that will make the simple tasks easy is always a good idea.

To say to not using any game engine was maybe exaggerating, but I believe it is important to understand the basic concepts. And when the goal is, to make a flappy bird like game, the canvas and some scripting would be a good start, I believe, if there is zero experience.

On the other hand, I also started with Adobes Flash. You could draw and animate and script right away ... and get awesome results right away .. without having to google html audio element.

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