Best Mobile Game Engine to make a casual game similar to Breakout and Billiards

Question

In your opinion, what is the best mobile game engine to make a game like this: There is a menu. From the menu you go to the level selection. The level select scene knows what levels you have completed because of a variable saved on the device (maybe in the cloud). You select a level. It goes to what level you selected.

There is a ball in the middle of the screen, you can touch anywhere and the ball will start off in that direction. It will bounce of walls, but never slow down. Once you have completed the stage, or you have failed, a screen will pop up with the options to either restart the game, go back to the menu or continue to the next level (if you passed).

That is the basic overview of the game I want to make (without giving away too much detail). I am trying to do this with Corona SDK, but Corona's Storyboard API is pretty hard to do if you want to be able to go from the level select to the game and repeat that over and over again.

Please only suggest engines that have good documentation. Otherwise, any game engine would do as long as it has a free option.

Answer 1

Honestly , There are tons of mobile engines out there that can help you get the job done. Knowing that it's huge and vast, I find Unity as your best bet. It makes implementing the menu easier and plus you can make menus pretty easily. In addition to that, It also now offers 2D support which I think helps you achieve your goal pretty easily with free mobile deployment.

Alternatives to Unity are :

Corona - Which you have already tried

App Game Kit - Which is also amazing : http://www.appgamekit.com/

I find those engines the three best engines for the game your looking to build since it's easy and needs some fast mobile game development engines.

You can also try some WYISWYG programming environments such as Scirra's Construct 2.

Hope you find that useful.

Answer 2

V-Play (I am part of the developer team), a cross-platform 2D game engine, has a breakout demo game template that you can take as a base for your game. There is also a tutorial and template that shows scene and level switching that will be helpful.

The engine is not free, but it has a free trial version where you can test it.

Answer 3

If you are using C++ you could try Oxygine 2D framework. It could be build on top of SDL2 or Marmalade.

Answer 4

You might also want to try GameSalad (I'm one of the co-founders). It's a cross platform 2D game engine and drag and drop development tool. On the manuals page there an example project called Crazy Wall Breaker which is a Breakout clone and I know there's a billiards template floating around somewhere.