Picking a game engine.

One of the major goals of our first title was to limit development time to no more than 6 weeks. This decision meant that we had to get focused on developing the game quickly and left little time to developing tools or an engine for that matter. We needed a As3 2D engine that would get us working on our core gameplay and features immediately. Fortunately, there are 3 great engines out there which fit that criteria perfectly: flixel, flashpunk and pushbutton engine.

Flixel was initially our first choice. It is a blazing fast 2d engine with incredible community support. The ability to quickly port the engine to other platforms was also quite appealing. The flixel engine also has an ever increasing library of great flash game being released including CANABALT and Gravity Hook HD.

Flashpunk was also considered and would make a great pick for a starter engine. Like flixel it is fast and has a great community of followers. However, unlike flixel this engine (at the time) was not as tested and was missing a few of flixel’s great features.

Finally there is pushbutton. This engine is probably the least known of the three. It is also the only engine that I know of which uses the component model over inheritance. If you don’t know what a component driven engine is capable of I urge you to look it up here. It not a traditional method but when done correctly it can save you hours of work. For this reason along with the future potential of this engine in the form of components made this our number one pick of the three 2D engines.

If you would like a indepth comparison of flixel and pushbutton engine check out Matthew Casperson’s Article here.