Survey: the reasons why I won't use Cocos Creator

If you don’t use Cocos Creator or not plan to, what’s the reason?
If you have used Cocos Creator for one or more products, would you use it to make your next game product? If not, what’s the critical concern?

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I chose cocos2d-x years ago because I wanted direct control over the code and the performance of native c++ without a bunch of overhead. If I was going to use a designer tool and scripts to make games I would have chosen Unity.

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im not familiar with js for creating a game, the syntax lil bit weird for me. I used to write in c++ or swift(right now i’m moving to SpriteKit since this issue) Well, cocos creator is good if c++ is part of built in system or main language not as plugin.

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We chose Cocos Creator because the licence price for Unity gambling games is crazy :smiley:
It was the best alternative I could find and I’m quite happy right now, my second choice was PixiJs but we had no time to build a solid visual editor and we need it to make a lot of games in a short time.

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Learning curve.
Cocos2d-x always had an important lack of documentation and support. Finally, 2 years after using it for first time, I have a feeling (probably wrong) of understanding what is happening under the hood. Now, I dont want to start again this painful undocumented roadtrip of learning more things of Cocos2d-x.

If I really was going to need any feature of Creator, I would prefer to go with Unity or any other editor full documented with hundred of tutorials.

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Hi,

Currently using Cocos Creator, I’ve finished 1 game, with another 3 in the pipeline to finish.

Why I use Cocos Creator?

  1. It’s open source, don’t know if that will be the same in the future?
  2. It’s Javascript, though, I’ve never programmed before, I found the API easy to understand somewhat, I’ve managed to create 1 game…
  3. It has an editor, you can compile offline…

Why I will be moving on to another engine in the near future?

  1. Lack of community support
  2. Lack of documentation, even though, it has improved, still needs further documentation , samples, tutorials, etc…

Cocos Creator is a very good engine, and the Creator team has done a good job, but the 2 points above really need to be addressed, if you would like to increase user base…God Bless…

Sincerely,

Sunday

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I agree with @luke2125

Reasons I use Creator:

  1. The game engine Cocos2d-x is open-source
  2. JavaScript / scripting based
  3. Easy to use editor
  4. Cross platform capabilities
  5. I feel the community support is there, the forum IS active
  6. SDKBOX integration

Things Creator needs to work on:

  1. Documentation, documentation, documentation. Please go for something like phaser.io documentation and Phaser’s Learn Page.

Cocos Creator is a very good engine, and the Creator team has done a good job!

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The phaser.io documentation is just awesome. I’d love to overhaul our docs to do something exactly like this.

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If you don’t use Cocos Creator or not plan to, what’s the reason?

We had initially planned on using Cocos Creator since it seemed like something our designer could use to do some of the basic layout/editing. However, we switched our game from LibGDX to Cocos2d-x because of Robovm being shut down (our main targets are iPad and web). So after seeing that Cocos Creator’s engine seemed like a branch off of the main cocos2d-x engine and was being developed closed source. We decided that it would be too risky to base our product on another closed source tool and the risks out-weighed the potential benefits.

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**Why I use Cocos Creator?

1) It’s open source, don’t know if that will be the same in the future?
It is? Since when? Are you sure? Cocos2dx is open source, Cocos Creator not. Or did I missed something?

I don’t use it, because i hate js (and absolutely don’t care about script languages), but love C++.
For my case SpriteBuilderX is a more better choice.
Cocos Studio was also ok, but nobody want freeze or crash every day.

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As the other users have said, lack of docs or support are a big minus. Typescript and JS is a big plus. A lot of people out there love Typescript.
I also know a few people that will never use any js engine unless it runs on linux, so CC is out, and Phaser 2-3 is in for them. And these are a few of the best devs I know.


I tested and really liked the CC editor, it can improve I’m sure, but has everything going in the right direction I think.
Personally if CC had active support, a linux port and other html5 exports like cordova, nw.js. I wouldn’t mind paying a small monthly fee or similar. You guys need the money to do a better job. Open source is good, free maybe isn’t the right choice for success.

I actually think if you guys focused 100% on being the best web engine out there, it would be a better use of your resources, and it would leave room for proper cross-platform support. Construct, for instance, sucks because it limits you so much. Phaser is great, but no editor like CC.
Generally in the web you wanna download assets when you want them to be downloaded, and load it when you think it’s the right time, memory management can be a thing. Control is everything(scripting required), but a visual input saves time.


An example of the docs problem: as I was testing the engine I noticed there was no auto-tiler and brushes for the tilemap, I figured i might make an addon for that later on, but it’s kinda of a chore figuring out how. Unity on the other hand, great docs, it’s very easy to figure anything out. People underestimate that unity got where they got because of high end learning materials.


One good developer I know told me once, about CC: ‘this project seems like a bunch of college kids…’ you get the idea. And that’s one of the nicest comments I’ve seen.
I think they are wrong but this is the image you guys send, I don’t know if you notice it.

Look at the homepage: it says click here to download CC 1.5.1, BUT the latest version is 1.5.2, you can find it in the download section, but who knew. And I believe there is also a loose link in the website, with a page that has a CC 1.0 download. I found it once through google.
These types of inconsistencies turn a lot of people away from the product.

I wish the project best of luck and will keep an eye on it, hope that you keep improving, web games are the future.

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Thanks.

This would be similar to the Example Collection available when creating a new project but with each example split into it’s own documented page.

talk about Phaser, i think cocos2d-html5 is better than for every part except the Webgl rendering with Microsoft’s browsers.
cocos2d-html5 is so bad on IE 11 and Edge.

Cocos Creator is really good for young starter with game, it provides better concept and rapid development for novice.
it is point cut of headache over UI building.

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Yes, the engine part will keep open source in the future.

Creator’s editor is closed source, the engine is opened at https://github.com/cocos-creator/engine (js) and https://github.com/cocos-creator/cocos2d-x-lite (jsb)

Cocos Creator lacks stability. Beta releases felt like alpha builds and stable release felt like beta builds. The QA process really needs improvements. I understand the editor and engine is evolving at a very fast pace and it is difficult to keep track of bugs. But I believe with proper and transparent automated test written and executed, most of the minor bugs and be identified and squashed. Moreover, we community can take part in it.

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Why I use it?

Already shipped a small casual/non original game just to test it and test SDK integration. The experience was awesome: I added Game Center support (iOS), Analytics (iOS/Android) and Chartboost videos(iOS/Android) in less than 2 days. It was awesome. I also completed and published the small game in 2 weeks.

  • High productivity
  • Rapid prototyping
  • Great Performance for 2D games
  • Entity Component System!!!

What I dont like it:

  • Lack of support on english forums: we need the dev team supporting early adopters.
  • Best practices documents: what is the best way of doing something?
  • More examples projects
  • Best practices
  • More bug support: we do not know if we are facing a limitation or a bug (see this: [BUG] TiledMap Parser error while set a tmx file)

And the most important: REAL SUPPORT to early Creator adopters

  • Chukong is a big company and I believe they can do muc better supporting/incentivize creating games in Creator. King made a contest and sent a few grups of developers to the GDC.

If you really care about us the developers, Invest MONEY in supporting us. Support the developers: sponsor games, small grants, add ads support/campaigns

Build regional support in more languages. Create forums in more languages. Find advocates and hire them (pay them!!) to spread the word in other languages, create events, build communities, and so on.

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That is the kind of things that I dont understand coming from a big company… it gives a bad message about the product and the company.

I tried using Cocos Creator, but… it wasn’t c++ support back then at all. Now it’s still alpha, so not ready for production yet. I don’t want to use js, sorry.