Gideros mobile is a 2D game engine based in the LUA programming language. It is not as fully featured as many other game engines and coding is something essential in order to make a game with it. Gideros features a powerful 2D engine although it completely lacks 3D support.

FEATURES

Gideros mobile is based on the LUA programming language and it is basically an environment to work with it. This means in order to use Gideros either you can program in LUA or you want to learn to do it. LUA is a powerful programming language and relatively easy to learn when you compare it to other programming languages.

There is no way you can do anything with Gideros mobile if you can’t code so, this is not a game engine for somebody who wants to create games with little or no coding. In Gideros, everything is coding.

However, it has some nice features like an instant device testing that can be used to try out the code without having to compile it and run it on a device. Directly from the IDE. It also allows local builds – you won’t need to upload anything to the internet to run it.

It is also multi-platform and as of now it supports OS X, Windows, Android and Windows mobile. No need to tell, with that name the most usual apps created in Gideros mobile are focused in the mobile market.

Auto scaling objects is really easy with Gideros mobile so all your graphics can be scaled to the native screen of the device, which is most useful when you are targeting the mobile phone and many phones have different resolutions. Animating is done frame by frame and you will have to set this up in code, there is no way you can do it in a visual environment as in many other SDKs. There is also nothing to create your sprites so, you will have to do this in a 3rd party tool.

But the best feature of Gideros mobile is the fact of being open source and totally free. Whatever you build with Gideros mobile is yours and you have to pay nothing to download, nothing for extras, nothing for hosting and if you make any revenue of your games it is all for you, no royalties either. As it is open source there is a helpful community behind it. In their forums there are users who will help you out and are very nice in this case. However, there are not many of them and there are not many assets or resources to share, not because they won’t do it but because there are just not too many users in Gideros mobile.

When you download Gideros mobile for free you will get the full pack and the full power. There are no restrictions whatsoever in the free package because there is no other package. It is all included and built-in, not needing any further download or plug-in to start developing games right away. That if you know how to code in LUA.

If you can’t code in LUA but you are willing to learn, the community will help you out and there are many tutorials online on how to program with it. We will let you see some sample code snippets in LUA so you can see it is not so difficult. Don’t be afraid, code doesn’t bite!

Let’s make a ball appear. First thing we will need the picture of a football, in this case in the .png format. And then we enter this short snippet to Gideros mobile.

Local bmp = Bitmap.new(Texture.new(“images/ball.png”,true)) Bmp:setPosition(100, 100) Stage:addChild(bmp)

The first line tells Gideros Mobile the path to the image file and we also use the true parameter to indicate we want the image filtered, or anti-alised for the most technical folks.

The second one will just let the program where do we want the image to appear in the screen. And the third one is just the command to render it. Voila! We have our picture of a ball displayed on screen.

Now let’s move to something a bit more with our ball, we want it to roll because that’s what balls are supposed to do. Let’s use our previous code with a bit of a difference:

Local bmp = Bitmap.new(Texture.net(“ball.png, true)) Bmp:setAnchorPoint (0.5, 0.5) Bmp:setPosition (100, 100) Stage:addChild(bmp)

As you can see it is almost the same as the first one but we just added a sentence, the second one, which references the anchor point. This means the ball will rotate there, because if not the ball will rotate from the top left corner and will not look like rolling.

Then we add this just below the previous snippet:

Stage:addEventListener (Event.ENTER_FRAME, function() Bmp:setRotation(bmp:getRotation()+5) end)

This piece of code makes the ball to rotate by 5 degrees on each frame. Now we just have the ball rolling and we can start developing more difficult stuff!

PROS and CONS

PROS

It is free and open source

The package comes with everything you need

The engine is quite powerful for 2D graphics

Can test directly on the IDE

No online dependency

Very nice community

LUA is a powerful language and rather easy to learn

CONS

Community is nice, but small

No 3D support

You need to code everything, no drag and drop options here

Not many tutorials on how to make games

CONCLUSION

Gideros mobile is a nice environment to use LUA and focus it to the mobile market, but it is completely dependent on code. You have to code everything so it is not so nice to view as other SDKs. However the community behind Gideros mobile is very nice and helpful and will try to help you even more than bigger communities. There is no 3D support but the 2D support is pretty good so, if you want to learn to code and you want to go with LUA, this can be your choice.