What is the best game engine for developing cross-platform 2D games? We don’t think there’s a definite answer. Depending on game requirements and the platforms where you’re going to publish your game, you may choose from many game engines.

We’ve already built a couple of games with Cocos Creator, and we want to share our experience.

Why did we choose Cocos Creator for developing Brute Arena DMND?

Arguably, the top two suites of game development tools are Unreal and Unity. These two suites allows game developers to create both 3D and 2D games. But we still opted for Cocos Creator to create Brute Arena DMND  and other games (Farkle Master DMND) for several reasons.

All the Cocos Creator features are available on the official page, but here are some features that we appreciated:

• Simple API and great documentation.

With Cocos Creator, it’s relatively easy to start creating games especially with no prior experience.

• Support for JavaScript.

Popularity of JavaScript is unquestionable. But support for JS also means you can write code in a safer language – TypeScript, which we actually used to develop Brute Arena DMND and Farkle Master DMND.

• Great portability of games.

With Cocos Creator, we can easily export Brute Arena DMND for various platforms such as Android, iOS, Facebook Instant Games, and WeChat (this list can be extended), in just one click.

• Publicly available roadmap.

We wanted to be sure about the future development of Cocos Creator. Having a clear picture of what will be available in IDE in the future is very important.

• Great performance.

Because Cocos Creator uses a JavaScript engine that’s based on Cocos2d-x, the performance of our games is high.

Basically, Cocos Creator provides a bit simpler toolkit in use than Unity or Unreal. Given that we were set to develop 2D games, using a huge game framework may be an overkill. Besides, unlike games built with Cocos Creator, Unreal-based games don’t work in the browser, and Unity builds are too large for in-browser games.

For comparison, our build of Brute Arena DMND is worth just 11MB. What’s even better, the browser doesn’t have to load the entire build in one go. Instead, the game content is loaded bit by bit, which improves gamers’ experience.

Thanks to Cocos Creator and several great libraries, we implemented the beta version of Brute Arena DMND in just two months. And the personas – the brute warriors – already had plenty of animations, which are relatively difficult to create with Unreal or Unity.

For reference, we used DragonBones to create animations. DragonBones is one of the top libraries that’s already integrated in Cocos Creator projects (and this library isn’t available by default in both Unreal and Unity).

To sum up, Cocos Creator allowed us to implement various functionalities in Brute Arena DMND (and Farkle Master DMND) exactly how we wanted.

• PLAY BRUTE ARENA DMND ONLINE - create your fighter and crash your opponents in arcade battle arena.