[casual_games] Casual Tools?

[Jeff Murray]

Hey Aaron .. Good surname ­ I don¹t think we¹re related ;)

Off the top of my head, here are the ones I would consider...

Unity3d ­ Excellent 3d engine and awesome support. Downside is Mac-only
authoring, but well worth the switch. Not too great on UI or 2d at the
moment, though, so UI-intensive games may be a pain to implement. Extremely
nice to use and you can get things up and running very quickly.

Popcap framework ­ If you want to go the C++ route, there are a few
frameworks available and Popcap is probably the most well-known of them.
There¹s also Playground and a few other good ones, though be sure to read
the licensing agreements carefully first. You are certain to get great
looking, polished results as long as you¹re willing to put in the extra
coding time.

Flash ­ Flash is absolutely awesome for 2d games, though it can be a little
tricky with performance when you get into the more complex eye-candy.
Hopefully that will change with the new Flash version, which allegedly has
hardware rendering capability. We¹ve produced a lot of Flash games, though
mainly advergames or mini-games as opposed to full-blown titles.

Director is still pretty good for download games and can be a solid solution
as long as you aren¹t asking for too much because of the dated engine. It¹s
got an uncertain future, sadly, as it used to be a leader in the field.

BlitzMax ­ Nice little engine (very low cost) mainly for 2d games, but I
think someone wrote a 3d plugin. Ideal for budget projects, but can be a
little cumbersome due to it¹s custom language implementation.

Torque Game Builder ­ Very cool for getting things going fast, though if you
want to do things that aren¹t Œout of the box¹ you may have to dig into the
engine code a little more than you might like.

Torque Game Engine ­ Great for 3d budget games, but the engine is a little
dated and source code is messy and can be awkward to work with. We¹ve
produced two retail titles with TGE and the game engine side has always
proved to be that way.

C4 Game Engine ­ I haven¹t actually used it, but I hear good things. Seems
like a nice budget-level engine.

Gamebryo Casual ­ Gamebryo now have a casual version of their AAA level game
engine. Licencing costs may be out of reach for smaller studios, but you can
guarantee that it¹s going to be a high class result. As this is C++ coding,
though, it may mean an extended production cycle compared to something like
Unity or Flash.

As for audio, a friend of mine recently found and passed on a link to this
awesome audio library, specifically designed for casual games ...
http://somaengineering.com/demo_video.html

Sadly, I don¹t know what the licensing costs are yet and I haven¹t been able
to check it out fully. Definitely something I want to look into, since it
gives your audio guys complete control over game audio and gives them a lot
of freedom to create more dynamic audioscapes.

JeffM

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