You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. -Richard Buckminster Fuller
Reality Check
Every game development engine or framework has its own bottlenecks and difficulties.Especially, when it comes to 2D game development,the difficulties increase.You have to take care of performance,mobile device hardware,device resolution etc.There is one more difficulty which developers generally ignore.i.e., language used for game development.
As a developer and game developer (Read this), I feel that its good to continue with what you are good at.I am a C# developer and to start game development with a new programming/scripting language for me is a huge learning curve altogether.
Cocos2d-x is one such {open source} {cross platform} game engine which supports multiple programming languages where x-> C++,Lua,HTML5 and Javascript.I love this engine for its simplicity,easy to learn , multi-language support and easy use,but the programming language which i am comfortable is missing here - C#.
The Savior
With Xamarin, you write your apps entirely in C#, sharing the same code on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and more. Anything you can do in Objective-C, Swift or Java, you can do in C#.
After closure of Microsoft XNA this April and MonoGame picking up slowly in the market.
Xamarin introduced something called CocosSharp and here is a small intro
CocosSharp blends the power of the Cocos2D programming model with C# and the .NET Framework. Developers familiar with Cocos2D will feel right at home with CocosSharp, as the API has been designed to follow C# and .NET idioms. - Miguel de Icaza
Read the complete introduction here
CocosSharp has picked all the good parts from Cocos2d and polished it with what they already had handy (cSharp).So
CocosSharp=COCOS2d+cSHARP.
As a C# developer,
Xamarin has provided the best document to help your kick-start with CocosSharp.Rewriting the same stuff here in a new way doesn't makes sense.So go through the stuff and comment if you have any questions or if you are facing issues.
Introduction to Game development with CocosSharp
Building Gone bananas with CocosSharp
Video Intro - CocosSharp is an exciting new platform from Xamarin that enables developers to create stunning 2D games for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows from a shared C# or F# code base. Mike Bluestein will cover game development strategies and how CocosSharp can help you deliver cross-platform 2D games for apps on all mobile and desktop platforms. By the end, you'll have all the knowledge you need to start creating your own games!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj0QJlYvObk
This is just the beginning !!! I will be writing more posts about CocosSharp in future.So stay tuned to learn more !!!
Courtesy : Xamarin
[…] Vidyasagar upped the ante with an exciting sneak peek into gaming with CocosSharp. He showed us folks how easy is to do start doing some basic game programming and answered to the cheeky questions from audience. His perspective and blog on the same could be found here. […]
ReplyDelete