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Top game development platforms of 2014

So we’re already in 2015, but 2014 brought to us many great games. And behind these games there were game engines, development tools. And everyone face the same doubts when starting to develop a game project, doesn’t matter if its a mobile runner or a console AAA: “what game engine should I choose”.

Well, that pretty much depends on your knowledge level, skill and ambitions with that particular game. You can find many articles on our website talking about the most trending game development platforms, but today we’ll bring you a top 5 list of the best engines of 2014.

Axis Game Factory's AGFPRO v2

If you’re looking to expand your Unity experience or make something completely independent of that engine, you will want to take advantage of this limited promotion. AGFPRO v2 is not a very well known development tool, however it is very powerful and we’d like to introduce it to you.

Axis Game Factory’s AGFPRO v2 allows you to create enviroments for your Unity based games, with access to many more options that the base possibilities that the Unity engine brings. And some of the DLC available actually make it possible to make your own game out of AGFPRO without requiring too much experience on this sector.

Some of the DLCs that you can purchase to complete this big tool allow you to develop your own FPS Zombie games, Side-Scroller RPGs, and so on, with a very easy interface that anyone could use even without any programming experience.

You can find Axis Game Factory’s AGFPRO v2 on the Steam website, and also all the extras available.

Corona

Today we’re going to talk about a developing platform more deeply than what we’ve been doing so far. We’ve talked about Corona before, but do you actually know exactly why people may choose Corona over any other development tool? If you don’t, today you will understand this choice and perhaps make it your own as well.

One thing is for sure: Corona is growing everyday, getting more and more popular as more people develop games and apps on it. Corona is very simple to use, yet it has so many tools it makes it a very complete and complex platform to use, however everything is structured so that all the features aren’t too overwhelming like what happens with other platforms for new developers.

Another good thing about Corona is that it doesn’t matter if you’re alone developing apps or that you’re on a big team trying to make the most popular smartphone game ever, as we said things are done so the huge amount of options don’t make it a very tedious experience when we’re not really professionals.

A detail that also attracts many developers is the fact that with Corona you can count on a library full of APIs that allow developers to create any kind of apps, games, ebooks, etc. for all kinds of platforms. There’s also a big community support from both Corona developers and also community managers that tend to answer all kinds of doubts.

To end our article, we’ll talk about the different licenses available on Corona. There’s atleast 4 kinds of license, being Free, Basic, Pro and Enterprise. To sum them up really quickly:

– Free: Allows you to freely develop stuff but you won’t be able to publish your projects (see it like a demo or trial version).

– Basic ($16 per month): Same features as Free, but now you’re able to publish your projects on Android, iOS and several others.

– Pro ($49 per month): Offer a huge number of new features and also allows you to have the license on a second machine, so you can work on your projects on diferente devices.

– Enterprise ($199 per month): Same as Pro, but now with the possibility of working offline. Perfect for small and big companies (prices may change according to the size of the company).

If you want to learn more about Corona, you can read this article where an analysis about Corona goes more into detail.

Unity3D update

A few days ago the update 4.6 of Unity 3D was released. According to the Unity 3D blog, one of the biggest changes on this update was the implementation of a new UI. This new UI is also available as source-code, as it was promised before by the Unity3D team because of their Open-Source Initiative.

With the new update also more options became available to make games more compatible with the new rules and protocols of Google and Apple. For example, now there’s x86 support for Android, so to develop your project now you can choose between FAT, x86 or ARMv7. This is important if you’re looking to develop apps for the Nexus Player, since it requires the build to be x86.

It was also mentioned that because of Apple’s latest announcement that said that starting on February, all apps must have 64-bit support, Unity3D already promised an update to cover this issue. We just don’t know if it will be as 4.x or if we’re seeing this on the new Unity3D 5.

When more news come up about this issue, we’re sure to let you know!

Chromecast

Gaming with the Chromecast device was already possible but very limited. The list of available games is very small and there’s a good reason for it: developers require to develop different apps in diferente languages in order to make them work on Chromecast.

But this nightmare will end when Marmalade launches their extension for the Chromecast device. With it, developers will only require to develop one project on Marmalade to make it work. You can start preparing yourself already if you want to reach that slice of customers, or you can go to Yeeply and hire programmers to develop games on Marmalade.

Obviosly this is also good news for any gamer that uses the Chromecast device. Now they won’t be limited to apps, vídeos and music, they will also be able to play their favorite games through their TV.

Today we bring good news for those who: 1) develop games for the Sony’s gaming systems; 2) develop games for any devices with the revolutionary Unity engine. A few days ago it was annouced that Sony and Unity Technologies extended their partnership. Summing up, this means more games made in Unity 3D, which also means more games for Playstation players.

To go a little into detail, Playstation games developers will continue to have access to several Unity Pro developing tools to create their own games. And for the future more tools will be available to make it easier to develop projects for these consoles.

And if you don’t have any experience in making games but would like to start developing games for Playstation in Unity, that’s also possible by hiring a developer from a website like Yeeply, where anyone can hire developers and designers for their own projects.

Yoyo Games released a new platform to combine to their popular engine GameMaker: GameMaker: Player. Until now most of the games were available through Yoyo’s website, but now with this new “market”, a game made and hosted on GameMaker: Player will reach millions!

GameMaker: Player works just like an app store but with benefits. Games can be launched free and paid, and just like what happens on Steam, developers can release their games in alpha / beta stage. Even the smallest concept of a game feature can be shared through this new platform.

The CryEngine is one of the most powerful tools we can find to develop games. It’s not the easiest of the engines to develop games, especially if you’re a one man team, however the results can be seen on every AAA games that were released with this engine, such as the Crysis trilogy, State of Decay, Enemy Front, among others.

For those who make games for a living their only money source are the ads, know that not all the developing platforms offer natively the necessary tools to make ads very lucrative, unless their games are very popular.

The team behind Marmalade is aware of this issue and announced a few days ago that its now possible to use Amazon mobile ads on games developed on Marmalade. What makes the Amazon Mobile Ads API different from many others is that you get paid by impression. This way you’re sure earn something from everytime a player sees an ad.

There’s something that have been circulating through the Internet for quite a while now that deserves the attention of anyone who enjoy working / playing with the Unity engine: there’s a possibility that the team that built Unity, Unity Technologies, are looking forward to sell the company. The price? People say its around 1 or 2 billion dollars.

It seems like a lot of money, but if we measure the value of their great engine, the amount of games released under this engine every day and what the future seems to bring to the engine, it seems like a fair price to ask for.