Made with Marmalade: The right tools for the job

You’re done. Your labour of love is live in-store, the downloads are rising and the dollars are rolling in from the native app that you’ve made. So what’s next?

Your native tool of choice has done you well, but now your mind is turning to the other mobile and TV platforms that are growing in consumer popularity – you naturally want your game there, too. Perhaps it’s time to consider a new way of working and look at the ever-increasing array of game dev tools on the market.

Your goal will be a tool that is flexible, open and immensely powerful, one that will give you the ability to compile straight to native machine code without any performance overheads; that fully supports a plethora of middleware and services modules and won’t stifle your creativity and will enable you to take one codebase to multiple devices.

Enter Marmalade, the cross-platform game dev tool. Let’s take a closer look at some recent releases that have taken advantage of just a few of the features of this increasingly popular and versatile game dev tool.

1. SILESIA GAMES’ BEYOND SPACE

Because of competition in the market, Silesia Games knew the action and the graphics of their game really needed to stand out. With that in mind, Marmalade provided a critical foundation for delivering the necessary level of performance. For Beyond Space, they created their own proprietary advanced 3D graphics engine, built on top of the Marmalade SDK.

2. HARDLINE STUDIOS’ ALPHA WAVE

Cross-platform was a pivotal part of the business plan for Hardline Studios, and the objective to get their game on as many stores as possible was the key reason they selected Marmalade. A big challenge when making the game was ensuring it looked and played the same across all platforms and with Marmalade’s engine; they were able to do just that. They also loved the easy deployment system, the platform abstraction and the memory manager.

3. SNAZZLEBOT’S COINS AND STUFF

The ability to deliver to multiple platforms was a big highlight for the Snazzlebot team, as was being able to use Lua for development with Marmalade Quick. The team mainly use Windows PCs for development so being able to deploy directly to iPhone from Windows was another major draw. The Marmalade Quick Lua-based RAD environment included with the Marmalade SDK feels very familiar if you have a Javascript background, so they found a simple yet very powerful and effective language for building games.

4. MICRO MACRO GAMES’ MORPHOPOLIS

Micro Macro Games really like the flexibility to customise Marmalade to suit their preferred workflow and build a lot of their own tools, in-engine, using Marmalade. For Morphopolis, they have built a custom 2D skeletal animator, including support for texture atlasing, rigging and keyframe-based animation; a scene editor, where they composited the game artwork; created paths for characters; and placed the game entities, objectives, cameras and animated objects.

For them, an editor using the game engine was a huge time saver due to the code duplication, and they could even demo the editor capabilities to others on a tablet. They found that the main benefits of Marmalade were C++ development for mobile, platform abstraction and ease of deployment, especially when developing for an unfamiliar platform. Compiler and deployment systems and the ease of turning code into an app on a device was also very valuable.

5. 22CANS’ GODUS

Using the Marmalade SDK allowed the team at 22cans to develop this ambitious game in C++ while enabling them to develop and have it run on all four target platforms without a performance overhead and with minimal code changes.

The Godus team loves Marmalade because it’s lightweight, flexible and robust, which is essential for unifying the development process across all their platforms.