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I'm about to embark on a 2D gaming project. Initially, I'll be targeting iPhone and Facebook, but would like to expand the rollout to include Android (and possibly Windows Phone) in a future phase.

Flash and Unity seem to be the most likely suspects, but is one better than the other? Are there pros/cons that may not be obvious at first glance? Are there frameworks that I have not considered?

I am primarily a .NET developer, so the Unity C# integration is appealling. But I also have experience with AS3, JavaScript and Objective-C.

Rich

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related, possible dupe: gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/16/… – Tetrad♦ Jan 16 '11 at 7:02
Also pretty much the same as: gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/6975/… – bummzack Jan 17 '11 at 8:18

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 16 '11 at 5:03

4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Corona ?

the big downside with Unity3D is you need two or three really large monitors :)

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I've spent some time with Corona and I really like it. It did not satisfy all my original criteria, but very impressed at the moment. – kim3er Jan 25 '11 at 13:34
up vote 5 down vote

Unity's great and all, and works pretty well on the iPhone, but for Facebook there are two near-fatal flaws.

1) Technical flaw: it always drops on top of other elements on the web page it's on. If you want to do a facebook "post to wall" fake popup window thing, you'll probably have to work around it by reducing the size of your unity window to 1x1. There might be ways around it by doing your facebook requests with your own UI, but I'm not entirely sure if that's possible/allowed.

2) Non-technical flaw: Users don't like installing plugins. You're not going to hit super high numbers by using a Unity game. This might change in the future, especially as more big-name people start using Unity for their web games (WB and EA in particular use it pretty frequently).

That being said, I'd trust Unity over the Flash cross compiler for iPhone dev any day of the week. It also has Android support. It doesn't have Linux support, and it most likely will never have WP7 support.

For reference, our game 2D game, Splode, was shipped to the following platforms: iPhone/iPad (universal app), Mac app store, and android apps store. Cross platform dev was pretty easy, all things considered.

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+1 Thanks for your advice. I'm amazed at the options out there. – kim3er Jan 25 '11 at 13:35
So you used Unity for Splode? – Dream Lane Feb 7 '11 at 4:12
2  
Yes, we used unity. – Tetrad♦ Feb 7 '11 at 4:19
up vote 1 down vote

I'm not aware of any easy way to make an App that will run on the iPhone, Android and Facebook unless you go straight HTML5.

For iPhone and Android cross-platform development you have a lot of options. Here are just a few:

  • PhoneGap
  • Titanium
  • RhoMobile
  • Corona
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up vote 0 down vote

Moai SDK is an open source framework and currently is able to publish to android, IOS and chrome. Rapanui, a high level API for maoi which is quite similar to corona SDKs API

The benefit of Moai over corona is that it is free to use and publish that it is open source (a seemly main complaint from Corona SDK users is the lack of low level control)

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