How and why we chose GameClosure ?
GameClosure is a cross platform mobile develop framework that helps in developing games for iOS, Android, Kindle and Facebook. HashCube makes cross-platform mobile games for all these platforms.
Background
We initially started off making standalone web games such as Sudoku Solver and Loop the Loop and facebook game such as Sudoku Quest and Dot Game which were primarily developed using HTML, JS & CSS
The mobile opportunity was exploding and we had jump onto mobile and we were faced with choosing a framework that we would like to use. This led to a list of goals that we wanted to achieve. We had no experience on mobile and this was our first attempt at creating one. Adding to all this we had to get a game out in 3 months. The first step was to list out all the goals that we needed for the framework.
Goals
- Speed of Development
- Cross Platform
- Extensible
- 2D Game Engine
- Native Support
Speed of Development
Mobile development usually needs a lot of testing on the device, because UI is built and then tried on a device, combine that with multiple phone sizes available on the market, testing would become a great nightmare. Being dependent on devices for testing would definitely slow down development. We wanted a framework that could be tried out without a phone, on a simulator and preferably testable on multiple screen sizes and resolutions before finally testing on real devices.
We and our team had a lot of experience developing for the web, so we preferred a language like javascript that could help us develop faster.
Cross Platform
Right from the beginning we were clear we wanted to cater to the two big mobile platforms — iOS and android. Anything else that it could support was a bonus and later we could release games for Amazon and also for Facebook.
Extensible
We understood that any framework may not support all functionality out of the box, but if it is extensible, then we could start adding new features(e.g facebook integration or attribution).
2D Game Engine
We were very clear from the beginning that we weren’t doing 3D games for at-least a while. Also we were porting Sudoku Quest to mobile that didn’t need any 3D functionality.
Fully Native
We didn’t want to use anything like phonegap as that would have also reduced our development time. We weren’t very sure how good the performance of phonegap based games would have been.
After Benefits
Multi device Support
Building for android is definitely not an easy task, because of the need to support multiple device sizes and screen resolutions. GameClosure had support for scaling the UI for multiple screen aspect ratios which made development a lot less difficult.
OpenSource
The framework was completely opensource, and we were big fans of opensource. This made the framework extensible and we could build a lot on top of the framework. It also helped us to easily debug and solve some issues in the framework that we encountered. We were also able to easily add a lot of functionality through plugins like support for multiple ad networks, facebook integration, gamecenter and gameplay integrations that even others could benefit from.
Missing
Like with any software project it has it’s shortcomings. It doesn’t support rapid prototyping. It doesn’t support more complex features like shaders that other game frameworks like Unity have. It’s limitations with animations and enhancing text are limited.
Future
We continue to evaluate other frameworks from time to time. The biggest reason we still continue to use it is because of it’s cross platform compatibility including the web. We might choose to use a different one in future like Unity, Defold or Cocos2d especially considering the development times might be vastly reduced, but we have been quite happy with it for now. We have also invested quite a bit of our efforts in extending the framework to create something quite interesting and churning games out fast which I’ll share in a future post.
