What tools, IDE, languages do you recommend for 2D game development?

Question

Hi, I like programming but I also like to draw and design nice-looking things, so I thought it will be nice to mix this two things developing some simple 2d games...

I've tried Flash but I don't liked it a lot from the programmer point of view, I like easy programming languages, like PHP (dinamic typing, etc.) or the old days of Visual Basic 6 (it was so easy and fast to create a functional app.!), Actionscript it's more like Javascript... well anyway... I don't like actionscript a lot...

I think not only the language it's important, also the availability of a good IDE for that language, something that helps me avoid doing the same things a hundred of times, or to remember what were the arguments of certain method...

The artistic part it's also important, that's in my opinion the strenght of Flash, but maybe there's something out there best suited for my needs of simple 2D game development. What would you recommend?

Platform: Web

Answer 1

If you're looking to do something that can run on both the desktop and in a web page...think about giving Silverlight a shot.

You get the familiarity of the .NET framework, Visual Studio/Blend as an IDE, and a lot of the sweet artistic abilities that are familiar to Flash developers.

Answer 2

i would recommend you to take a look at XNA

http://www.xna.com/

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

Answer 3

I have been playing with the canvas element and JavaScript for some simple application graphics.

It is a hog, but I embedded the Gecko engine into a GTK app to display some graphics using the canvas and external javascript.

Not perfect, but hackable and neat.

Answer 4

I'd go with .Net. Since you have VB6 experience, you could switch to VB.Net easily, although I'd recommend C# since most of the code samples you'll find are in C#.

.Net's 2D graphics library is comprehensive and relatively easy to learn. Even if you're writing for platforms other than Windows, the Mono project allows you to port a .Net app to Mac or iPhone, plus a few other platforms.

Here's a link to an online book that covers graphics in C#:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/books/1861004990.aspx

Answer 5

well, i am having fun with java, and java Me , micro edition for celphones smartphones etc. Java is quite good because runs in all OS sistems (minus i phone that have their own object language based ($teve job$)) its a O-o programming , you can write some methods(like the vb functions) and u have a lot of API.

/developers.sun.com/mobility/midp/articles/game/

/java.sun.com/products/java-media/2D/index.jsp

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/java-game-tome

but if you want web based programs , java still cool

i am Using Eclipse IDE /www.eclipse.org

search JME plugin for makin mobiles apps: /java.sun.com/javame/downloads/sdk30.jsp

dont feel fear about eclipse have so many buttons :P try.

ps: all free;

Answer 6

If you want a really simple tool, then there is always gamemaker. wont play online natively, but will with a firefox/activeX extension. It is alot more basic than the other tools suggested, but some quite impressive games have been made with it.

Answer 7

I've only played with the iPhone version (which is pretty good in itself), but cocos2d might be exactly what you''ve looking for.

http://cocos2d.org/

about

cocos2d is a framework for building 2D games, demos, and other graphical/interactive applications.

main features

• Flow control: Manage the flow control between different scenes in an easy way
• Sprites: Fast and easy sprites
• Actions: Just tell sprites what you want them to do. Composable actions like move, rotate, scale and much more
• Effects: Effects like waves, twirl, lens and much more #
• Tiled Maps: Support for rectangular and hexagonal tiled maps
• Transitions: Move from scene to scene with style
• Menus: Built in classes to create menus
• Text Rendering: Label and HTMLLabel with action support
• Documentation: Programming Guide + API Reference + Video Tutorials + Lots of simple tests showing how to use it
• Built-in Python Interpreter: For debugging purposes BSD License: Just use it
• Pyglet Based: No external dependencies
• OpenGL Based: Hardware Acceleration

Answer 8

As a student at Champlain College in the Game Programming degree I answer this question a lot. In general your choices here are somewhat limited based because of your desire to use the web,but in general I would say stick with Flash.

If you are looking to be able to spend some time getting into programming games, with the ability to take advantage of an easy pipeline(The implementation of assets into a project) for a short project learn to love flash. Flash allows a one man team to produce interesting work, in a decent amount of time. As you said the strong-suit of flash is the graphical interface, and you are right but it is so much more than that. Flash handles all of the more annoying technical pieces from other 2D development platforms, like animation. Also you can use one of the several different flash IDEs that have been built to solve a lot of the faults of the flash code editor (Such as a lack of good code sense like you said you would like to have.)

Flash Develop Wiki

Flash develop is a pretty good tool that a lot of my co-workers here use (I work summers at a company called the Emergent Media Center). It has some code sense and allows you to edit in a pretty decent IDE. This should solve your dislike of actionscript (As action script is a nice dynamically typed language that is easy with a decent set of helpful libraries)

If flash develop doesn't do it for you though google up some different flash IDEs and try them out. There are a lot of good ones out there. As a side note these IDE are only for the code portion of flash, and will require you to separate your code out in to .as files (like you should be doing anyways)

Anyways good luck with Game Programming!

Answer 9

once you have gotten into game developement, you will find very quickly, that performance matters ... dynamic languages are slow ... and PHP, as you mentioned, is by far one of the worst ... plus the language is inconsistent and the API is horrible ... which is why there is no proper IDE for that ...

ok, personally, i think the AVM2 (actionscript virtual machine 2, i.e. flash player 9 and higher), is a good platform for web based game developement ... as you are a windows user, i would advise you to use Flash Develop, as Bryan did ... it's simply the BEST ActionScript IDE around (ok, some guys might argue that FDT is better, but ... no ... plus FD is free, and FDT is at fewhundred dollars) ... it's so good, that mac and linux users virtualize windows to run it ... an ass-kicking autocompletion, code generation, snippets etc. ... and it's fast, unlike other IDEs providing these features (it feels much better than eclipse and net beans)... FlashDevelop is a plain ActionScript editor ... unlike in the flash IDE, you can't use it for drawing/morphing/tweening ... but you can use FD to write your code and the flash IDE to do the graphics and then compile either with FD or the flash IDE (the latter is easier, since there is a project type that offers a very good work flow) ...

you could alternatively use haXe, which is a high level open source language, that allows compiling/translating to AVM1 bytecode, AVM2 bytecode, PHP source, JavaScript source, neko vm bytecode, C++ source (.NET and JVM are being worked on) ... it also has very cool languages features ... but it requires you to code even stricter, than ActionScript ... on the other hand, the compiler outputs bytecode, that is upto 30% faster ... and haXe can use Flash Player 10 alchemy opcode, that allow very fast and direct memory manipulation ... and interesting fact to mention is that haXe was developed by Nicolas Canasse from motion twin, who are the leading web game developer/publisher in France ...

choosing flash as a plattform seems to make sense to me, because flash is

1. fast
2. small
3. has been used A LOT for web games, so there are PLENTY of resources around, you can use, like physics engines (APE for actionscript, physaxe for haXe), etc. ...

the main flash con to me is, it has performance problems on mac and linux ... but anything that is not developed for mac or for linux respectively, faces these problems ...

about other platforms mentioned:

• JavaScript: you will REALLY hate this ... every browser implements everything differently ... you will have an awful time ... canvas is not available across all browsers ...
• Java: it's suprisingly slow in relation to its verbosity, bloated, and it's the wrong language for games ... use JavaFX instead ... but still ... personally i don't like software running on the JVM, simply because of the VMs insane booting time ...
• Silverlight: in principle, a VERY promising technology, but penetration is still relatively poor and it has practically never been used for web games, so you can't really rely on years of experience of many developers ... i think there are reasons why silverlight did not (yet?) turn out to be the flash killer, although there is a huge .NET developer community ...
• gamemaker: it's an extra plugin ... don't know, if that's cool with you ... but i like to use things that are widely spread ... if you wanna follow that path, you might wanna check out unity as well ... note that both are for creating 3d games, which is not what you wanted ... so they don't really offer an advantage over flash ...

in any way, you should use a technology and language, that A is developing, and B you are comfortable with, or that you find really interesting enough, to get comfortable with it ...

well, good luck then ... ;)

Answer 10

If your platform is the web, then Flash or Flex are your only real choices. There are plenty of browser plugins for game development, but most of these focus on 3D (like Unity, Torque etc). You can find a tutorial for making 2D Flash games here.

The new HTML5 canvas element could also be used - most of the major browsers (excluding IE) support it, and JavaScript engines are getting to the point where they are fast enough for graphically demanding applications. You can find a Chrome Experiment that shows you how to make a JavaScript/Canvas game here.

At the end of the day the language you use to make a game really doesn't matter - once you get your head around the few idiosyncrasies of a language, the logic behind them is all pretty much the same. The platform you are targeting will generally define the language and tools you use.