First app/impressions using Gideros

tharek

I'd like to start off by saying Gideros is pretty amazing (personal comparisons below).

The app is called Thready and is a simple game.
Store description: "Thready requires the simple act of threading squares through a bigger square. The real question is: how long can you keep threading?"

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innowva.thready

Hope you enjoy and critical feedback is always welcome!

Here's some comparisons with other SDKs I've tried to create the same app:
Construct 2: Cost Money. Super easy but the performance was low.
Phaser: Free. Better performance than C2 but lags on mobile (as hybrid app).
Corona: Free. Great performance but app size became huge when adding AdMob and began lagging.
Gideros: Free. Great performance, relatively good app size and 0 lag with AdMob.
I also tried other such as Cocos2d-x but weren't successful.

My only problem with Gideros is how difficult it was to find. I happened to stumble upon it, after a lot of searching for SDKs. IMO it should be in lists along with Corona and Unity.

simwhi

@tharek Congratulations on the new app. I'll try it out and rate it when I have time.

I agree that Gideros is a little more difficult to find, Can you remember specific sites that did not mention Gideros. Do you search in English or another language?

antix

@tharek awesome, congrats on getting your first game on the play store. It looks clean and simple. I'll give it a whirl in the morning

With regards to Corona, it also requires you to upload your source to their servers to compile which can be mildly irritating if you have no internet connection

Personally I never tried Coinstruct2 because it was a total "paywall" system and didn't even learn of Phaser until I was about 2 months into using Gideros.

I tried a few other engines before deciding to use Gideros. It has some rather gaping holes in what it provides by default but is miles ahead of other engines, especially in the performance arena.

@simwhi pretty much 99.9% of sites that discuss different engines do not even mention Gideros. Gideros really doesn't have a name "out there" yet, most likely because nobody is actually actively promoting it Until recently I was mentioning whenever appropriate in r/gamedev and a few other reddits I follow.

tharek

@antix I've seen some pretty amazing games made with C2 and it's worth checking out the trial version.

@simwhi In English and as antix said 99.9% don't mention.

I also almost skipped over Gideros because the website looked a bit... old. But that might be just me.

antix

@tharek,thanks. I'll have a look at it this weekend.

MikeHart

Congratulations on your first Gideros app. And welcome to the forum.

tharek

Congratulations on your first Gideros app. And welcome to the forum.

Thanks

antix

@tharek. Tried your game this morning. It's really cool but one of those games that I'm totally hopeless at. I think difficulty settings would be good so noobs like me could opt to learn with a larger square

I checked out Construct2 and it looks pretty powerful. The demo doesn't allow exporting to Android and I'm not parting with over $400 to discover performance issues there. They also don't support reward video adverts yet either (hey "snap" Gideros)

SinisterSoft

Gideros supports reward videos, tested on Chartboost, AppLovin and others.

hgy29

And soon Unity Ads reward videos too

tharek

@antix Good suggestion. C2 exports as HTML5/Cordova which is why the performance lacks, unless you add Crosswalk which is about 30mb.

antix

@tharek yep I think I saw that mentioned on their website.

MikeHart

I checked out Construct2 and it looks pretty powerful. The demo doesn't allow exporting to Android and I'm not parting with over $400 to discover performance issues there. They also don't support reward video adverts yet either (hey "snap" Gideros)

I think the personal edition for 99 is fine for exporting to android.

antix

@MikeHart thanks. I would really like to be able to compare it to Gideros before possibly throwing money away on it though

MikeHart

If you wanna go mobile, then stick with gideros or other tools that support it natively.
C2 shines in the desktop area imho. Quite a few steam games do pretty well. I would not use it for mobile stuff. To much of a hassle fighting performance problems your users will report and unless you are lucky, you don't make much there anyway.

antix

Thanks @MikeHart

simwhi

@antix We used C2 on two major projects. Desktop was a breeze compared to mobile. You have to be very mindful of performance for mobile, and you also have to rely on third party solutions for Android and iOS. It's a great tool for non programmers though. We prefer the far more flexible approach of programming with Lua.

antix

@simwhi yeah my impression of C2 is that it's super easy to use but you are most likely going to end up spending loads of money in the asset store buying things.

MikeHart

@simwhi yeah my impression of C2 is that it's super easy to use but you are most likely going to end up spending loads of money in the asset store buying things.

Well, only if you need to.

antix

@MikeHart true, but if you want to accelerate your product I can see this happening quite easily

MikeHart

What do you mean by "accelerate your product"?

antix

I mean get it to market quicker

simwhi

@antix @mikehart We haven't used C2 for such a long time now. It's a great tool to start out with, but any serious developer will outgrow it in a short period of time. The drag and drop approach to programming can get very cumbersome when you have large projects to maintain and improve, whereas, scripting is a lot more flexible and powerful.

If you want to make games for Android/iOS then C2 is not the tool (especially when you need performance). As mentioned above, you need to be as close to native as possible.

john26

@tharek, congratulations on the new app, will try it out asap.

When you discovered Gideros what learning resources did you use, tutorials, video tutorials etc? How did you get on with the documentation?

We've recently added some video tutorials which hopefully makes it easier for new users to get started...

tharek

@john26 Thank you.

I like to learn as I do, so I basically Googled whatever I wanted to achieve. I used a mixture of the documentation, forums and YouTube.

As far as I can remember, the documentation was good. Can't think of any suggestions but I'll let you know if any come to mind.

totebo

My experience with Gideros is similar, although, for some reason, I tend not to choose videos as a way to learn. I use the API reference instead in most cases and Google if my problem isn't mentioned.

antix

If we are talking about videos, can we get all the irrelevant ones removed from the website? Getting irrelevant and broken links to non existing websites would also be good.

May I ask if the Gideros website is some custom made system or is it something like WordPress where it's fairly easy to maintain?

john26

The video tutorials are simply hosted on my Youtube channel. Let me remove my non-Gideros stuff from that channel (sorry!)

antix

I wasn't talking about things like non Gideros stuff, I was talking about things like some of the plugin videos which should be gone when Android Studio is cemented as the preferred IDE for use with Gideros