![]() So, Moai has quality published games under it’s belt, the support of heavy weights working on two games I am incredibly interested in ( in a time I am not interested in too many games! ), using a technology ( LUA ), that I have been interested in learning for a very long time ( … like, a decade ). His past credits include Shadowrun, Battletech, MageKnight, Crimson Skies, Earthdawn and more. If there is a template for a successful game designer, this is him. More to the point, it’s the founder of Harebrained Games that really got my attention. Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis is easily in my top 10 favorite games, perhaps my top 5, so this is a game I am dying to see. What probably has me most excited though, is the upcoming Shadowrun Returns. The fact it is one of the more technically competent games I have played yet on Android speaks well of Moai’s capabilities. It is possible you’ve never heard of them, as they have only released one game so far, Strikefleet Omega, a very cool RTS for iOS and Android, written of course in Moai. As does another one, who also reaped the benefits of KickStarter. ![]() Let’s just say, his is a voice that carries a lot of weight. Other than making Kickstarter famous, Double Fine’s incredibly well funded upcoming adventure game is being powered by Moai. Tim’s prior games is a collection of awesome Psychonauts, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Full Throttle and even the recent Costume Quest ( which if you haven’t played it, you are missing out ). First off, is Tim Schafer of Double-Fine Games. Me, I like to get my hands dirty.Īnother big selling point for Moai is the names that have thrown their weight behind it. ![]() Simply put, each SDK targets a different user-base, and Moai targets the group that want to get their hands dirty. Don’t get me wrong, I am not implying you can’t make a good game with Moai if you aren’t a pro, much as I am not suggesting you can’t make a professional game with Corona, you obviously can. To put things in the simplest terms possible, if you have no prior game programming experience and want to make an iPhone game, Moai is probably not right for you. On the one hand, it is much more flexible ( infinitely if you include the fact it is open source ) than Corona, on the other hand, it is much more difficult. Why is this? Moai doesn’t really make decisions for you which is a double edges sword. You have to create a native host for each platform your game is going to run on ( although templates are provided ), and what might take one line in Corona might take ten in Moai. There is no friendly installer, just a zip to extract. MAOI is written for experienced game developers and targeted at the same demographic. The less resources that exist on the subject, the more likely people will find what I write!Īnother big point is the target audience. ![]() As a technical writer though, this appeals to me. There are no books, few tutorial sites, etc… Contrasted again against Corona there is this book, plus this and this. There are a few entry level samples, the documentation on this page and the class reference. Worse still, the community is quite small and there is very little in the way of supporting documentation. It is also appealing to me, as if I can’t understand something from the documentation, I can jump into the source code… speaking of which, that leads to the second point.Ĭompared to Corona, documentation is sparse to completely non-existent. This is certainly a big deal to larger development houses with C++ resources in house. Hopefully they will support what you want in a future release, but if they don’t you are pretty much SOL. With Corona, if you don’t like what you see, tough. The most obvious comparison that comes to mind is to think of Moai as a free open-sourced Corona but that wouldn’t be completely accurate, for a couple of reasons.įirst, well, it is hard to ignore the open source aspect. If you have never heard of it, Moai is an open source, cross-platform game engine written in C++ but scripted using LUA. Moai is one of those projects that has been drawing my interest for a very long time.
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