

Game Closure launches mobile development suite for free, makes it open source - unstoppableted
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2013/02/14/game-closure-launches-mobile-development-suite-for-free-makes-it-open-source/

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acron0
This is actually pretty exciting. There are _a lot_ of SDKs out there for this
cross-over of mobile and web games (Unity3D, Ejecta etc), but none of them
have been built with this kind of pipeline in mind and the GC devs are clearly
aware of how people are using the existing tools in this space. In-built
localisation? Remote debugging? Yes, please! I'm a long-time Unity3D developer
and evangelist but this will definitely get some face time from me.

~~~
zura
May I ask you about Unity3D experience? I played with it and I got an
impression that it is a tool for designers - a lot of time is spent tinkering
in complex UI...

Do you know if it is possible to have a more engineering oriented workflow?
More, if not fully, code oriented projects? Even if it would require some
boilerplate code equivalent to that tinkering in UI.

~~~
acron0
I am a freelance Unity3D developer :) There is certainly a tool-focussed
approach but even as an engineer, this can work quite well for you and help
speed up the soft decisions. Personally, I like leveraging the editor in this
kind of way but I know some people who refuse to touch it and do _everything_
in code only. So yes, it's absolutely possible.

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register
Free?!? I doubt it! Unless your game source code is released to the public.
The license of every component in the SDK is GPL. Based on this
discussion:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5221461> it seems that the SDK
will be dual-licensed with a developer friendly license. However in the github
repo only GPL is cited.

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woogley
More discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5221461>

I actually tried it out this weekend. Overall it's pretty good.. there are
some sharp corners, but when you iron the kinks out, it really does work well.
So far I have exported a HTML5 Canvas demo to Android and am excited to try
iOS soon.

One thing that needs to happen soon is documentation update. E.g. for the
Engine[1] class, `getCanvas` is deprecated[2]. Additionally they don't tell
you (or I missed it) that your app/view can supply a `render` function that
receives a canvas context directly.

Luckily, there are several demos provided where you can learn these
undocumented tricks, but it still shakes my confidence a bit because I don't
know if I'm doing things the "right way", or if what I am using will disappear
soon.

[1]: <http://docs.gameclosure.com/api/appengine.html>

[2]:
[https://github.com/gameclosure/timestep/blob/master/src/ui/E...](https://github.com/gameclosure/timestep/blob/master/src/ui/Engine.js#L182)

