The top 14 game engines: Shiva

Company: Stonetrip
Platforms: Android, BlackBerry OS, Browser, Flash, iOS, Linux, Mac, PC, PS3, Wii, Windows Phone, Xbox 360
Used in: Babel Rising, Non Flying Soldiers
www.shivaengine.com

Shiva’s slogan is ‘develop once, publish everywhere’.
Produced by French studio Stonetrip, this engine supports over 16 platforms and has gained a reputation among small studios and bedroom coders.

Support for the Windows Store was recently added, which also necessitated a fit for DirectX 11. Shiva can now be used to bring titles to Windows 8, RT and Windows Phone.

“We offer a very robust, powerful and scalable game engine that runs on basically everything, from current generation consoles, web browsers, mobile phones and tablets to powerful desktop gaming computers, delivering you the best possible performance on your target device,” says Stonetrip CTO Nicolas Peri.

Testing is something many of the engine makers in this year’s feature point to as an ongoing issue. Shiva is no different.

“We stopped counting how often a new iOS or Xcode update broke games that were working flawlessly with previous releases. But we are committed to keeping our engine up to date, so we release fixes and updates regularly,” says Peri.

Stonetrip’s approach to cross-platform development is to avoid discrimination.

“We do not believe that there are some platforms that are more important than others. Our customers report far better sales on less crowded app stores, such as Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble and BlackBerry, while the commonly perceived ‘popular’ ones, such as iOS and Android, hardly bring back in the development costs – the indie app gold rush on these platforms seems to be long over.”

Right now, Stonetrip is focused on its next major editor release, which will contain a faster particle system, an improved physics engine, custom shader and HUD editors and a new user interface, among other things.

You can view all of the top 14 game engine profiles as they are published here.