Game Frameworks: What are people using for game jams nowadays?
Hi,
I've been mulling ideas about a game for a while now, I'd like to hack out a prototype, and my default would be Love2D. (As an aside: one of the things I like about Love2D was that you could make a basic 'game' in a couple of LoC, and it was 'efficient enough' for what you got. Perhaps the only gripe I had with it was that it didn't output compiled binaries (I mean, you could make it do that, but it seemed like a hack). I think Polycode seemed to be a semi-serious contender, but last I checked (a year or two ago) it's pretty much as dead as a doornail. Some of the other alternatives I remember seeing (Godot? Unity?) felt too much like Blender.
So I've been wondering, it's been a while since I've been keeping tabs on the 'gamedev community', so I don't know if there have been any more recent development in that space.
So I guess my question is: What are people using for game jams nowadays? Preach to me (and everyone else) about your favorite framework and language :)
I have only really done 2 game jams, and I found that for game jams, depending on what you want to make, pico-8 is pretty good. I personally don't love lua, but it is easy to get up and running and can export to html5. Outside of game jams, I have used Godot, which was fine, but not my personal cup of tea, ggez which I like a lot, but is written in Rust so compile times are slow, and toyed around with custom engines, but that is probably too much for a game jam. For hacking together a quick game I would just go with whatever you are most comfortable with. For most quick prototyping, engine will not matter.
I think Godot engine is pretty popular nowadays.
I like to use MonoGame. I wrote a bunch of libraries to make it easier to work faster. With .NET core, it's really easy to distribute the game on many platforms.