I’m currently reviewing some engines (Godot, Defold and Cocos Creator) because I want to get started in Android (game) development. I originally come from libGDX but I wanted capable visual editors mainly (I’m not talking about visual scripting - just editors for sprite placement etc.).
So now I check what each engine has to offer and regarding Cocos Creator it’s mainly a really nice editor, JS instead of Defolds LUA (I hate that language) and SDKBOX. Now I can look over the somewhat lacking documentation (also I hear you are working on it) but not over the build time for Android. Is there any way to speed it up in Cocos Creator? I heard about precompiling libraries and something about caching but I’m not sure if that works with Creator. Plus I’d like to add that this is a bit uncomfortable from a user perspective. I currently need 1.5 minutes to get the simple tutorial game running on my android phone - using Defold I get it up and running over wifi (!) in seconds and even Godot exports way faster though slower than Defold.
Let me know if you have some ideas for this problem or if you regard it as a problem at all. Some features can be developed and tested on desktop but in general I get a much better feeling working directly on a target device and since iteration is such a key to game development I’m a bit confused why noone is “complaining” about this (I’m not really complaining - I’m just confused).
I know that Lua is a language by its own but that’s not the point of my question.
As far as I’m aware the only option to play on my phone without building the apk is through the browser right? Is this comparable enough to native that I can use it for debugging?
In Defold they use a companion app similar to Unity Remote which feels more native (I don’t know how this works from a technical point).
Hm I disagree with that. I think because of screen size and touch input as well as the given mobility with smartphones / tablets the look and feel differs quite a lot. There are a lot of games which I enjoyed on mobile more than desktop / laptop. Also accelerometer input is not possible otherwise. But maybe testing in browser is enough. I’ll need to test it a bit more.
I just checked again:
“A stand-alone version of the Defold engine is available as a ready made .apk file that you can install on a device and use for iterative development wireless.”
Doesn’t sound like a web view - even though I could be wrong on that.
@jrosich Okay I checked again. I think I’d be okay with running the game in the browser if I could get it to work in fullscreen. The docs say that the engine will attempt to get fullscreen on mobile however it doesn’t work in chrome on my phone. Do you have any input / solution on that?
No, sorry I dont. My target is not HTML5 and I do not need native inputs like accelerometer. So I develop my game in the browser with phone screen size and then I build iOS/Android versions once a week to keep testing on my devices. So far so good.
In all my CC tests the web exports work in FS all the time, I actually thought it was strange when it first happened.(wasn’t expecting that)
I suggest you take one of the project examples, try to run it, see if it fullscreens and go from there.
And also, I believe all of these app integrations are -not- webviews. I know unity’s isn’t.
