

Double Fine chooses Moai - snprbob86
http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/01/how-two-startups-are-joining-forces-to-fix-the-mobile-silo-problem/

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greggman
this is going to sound like a sales pitch for Unity but ...

Engine + Tools > Engine

Moai = Engine Unity = Engine + Tools

I've got 25 years experience making AAA games. I am continually amazed at how
productive people are in Unity. I've got several x-coworker friends from
various AAA game companies including Namco, EA, Vicarious Visions, and others
that have started using Unity. All of them can't praise it enough. Some of
these are even engine guys. In other words, the types most likely to have a
"not invented here syndrome".

I've also been watching and participating in game jams and watching the
amazing things coming out of them with the largest percentage coming from
Unity.

Been to a few "teach kids game programming" events where Unity was one of the
options and those kids always come away with more than the kids doing python,
processing or JavaScript.

Even GDC had several unity games at the experimental gameplay session, the
indie games summit and more.

There's also a large market of 3rd party libraries and editor plugins for
Unity that provide many of those things like support for social network X or
picture service Y. Unfortunately Unity stupidly made the store for those
plugins only accessible from inside Unity, buried in the Window menu under
"Asset Store" so that none of it is discoverable from the outside.

Of course there's a learning curve. If you've written your own engine it's
easier to get a couple of images/models on the screen by writing code from
scratch. But for a real game with a team that initial speed is quickly dwarfed
by the amount of work writing exporters to support your artists, level editors
to support your game designers and the fact that Unity editor is fully
interactive while the game is playing for the ultimate in quick iteration
times. You can practically edit functions on the fly as the game runs.

No, I don't work for unity and I actually haven't done more than a couple of
tutorials nor have I used Moai but I have written 6 game engines and all the
tools and utilities for them and after seeing my various friends and
x-coworker's successes and praise for Unity I'm not about to pick something
that only provides 1/2 to 1/3rd the feature and therefore have to pick up the
slack myself.

~~~
ralfn
Unity does not support linux. So how is it even relevant for Double Fine given
their stated requirements? Or any other game dev given the possible future of
linux based steamboxes?

~~~
adam-a
A while ago I spoke to a Unity engineer about this. He told me they have
internal builds running on Linux. I think the main thing holding them back
from releasing it is the testing they would have to do for each distro.
Probably not worth it for the limited use it would see.

If Linux Steamboxes do become a reality they would quickly be able to release
Unity for that platform.

Of course I wish they would release the editor for Linux as I would like to
use it :)

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mbenjaminsmith
I started a games company at the beginning of the year and am constantly
researching game engines. If I wasn't working in 3D I would have went with (or
switched to) Moai. It looks like a great mix of productivity boosting features
and a no-BS, close to the metal way to create cross platform code. I also like
their focus on the networking, advertising, analytics, etc features in their
SDK.

I'm currently using Unity. Their core product is decent but their team (at
least the CEO and the sales guys, I haven't interacted with any tech guys) are
obnoxious. I met with their sales rep in Asia (where I'm based) and he told me
in no uncertain terms that they don't care about small teams. And that they
were horrible at communicating because they don't see themselves as having any
real competition. I think it's the fist time I've been heavily invested in a
technology and at the same time wanted to see it become obsolete.

One of the best parts of Moai is Lua. I had started with Unity working in C#
(seemed like it would be less performance bound) but didn't really like the
toolkit until I switched over to the relatively obscure Boo (it has a Python-
like syntax). Even with the almost total lack of documentation it's just way
more productive than the other language choices. Switching to really terse
scripting language has had a big impact on productivity for me.

~~~
dhelgason
I'm really sorry about your negative interactions with our team in Asia – they
don't reflect the fact that we very much feel we're competing with every other
option there is out there, and generally never being as good as we can be at
serving developers. And not just competing the 3-5 significant other 3D engine
companies, but also internal technologies, open source engines, and even very
different approaches like picking 2D instead of 3D in cases where both might
work.

Our entire business model is built around supporting individual developers and
small teams, and while we've more recently started to learn to support bigger
customers, it not how we think about our product and company and we've kept
building and licensing great tech that we then release to everyone using Unity
– the same for all, from the littlest indie shop to EA.

PS. I'm glad that you liked Boo, it's a cool language whose designer works for
us doing many Mono and compiler-related projects.

PPS. Apart from being kind of enthusiastic about Unity and the business we're
in I'm usually not told that I'm obnoxious, but I can live with it if I have
to. In any case feel free to get in touch on twitter (davidhelgason) or by
email at david at unity3d.com. Also would love to hear more about your bad
experiences in Asia, these are new teams and maybe someone didn't get the memo
about democratization yet.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
Thanks David, it's good to get a more positive response from you guys. I'll
send you an email to continue our conversation.

[Edit: I received an email from Nicholas. I'll follow up with him]

------
dmpk2k
Harebrained Schemes (the Shadowrun Returns team on Kickstarter) also uses
Moai. Perhaps it's worth a look.

Other than the cloud parts, can anyone compare it with Love2D?

~~~
seclorum
MOAI is very similar to Love2D in some ways (Box2D, etc.) but the general
application programming model is different - you don't have callbacks to
implement features in MOAI, you simply set up the state of various game
objects and layers and so on, then let 'er rip ..

I've found myself being very, very productive in MOAI. It took me 30 minutes
to build a Path-like custom control for one of my applications, whereas it
took me a day or two to do it in Love2D, and its nowhere near as elegant as
the MOAI approach.

~~~
dmpk2k
Interesting. Thanks. :)

------
trimbo
> There are two versions of the game running on the same back-end, one for the
> Java-based Android games and one for the C-based iOS games.

Someone alert the media that Android's NDK has been available for around 3
years now and allows you to write apps/games entirely in C or C++ for Android.

------
jianshen
Moai's hosting services are an interesting differentiator (compared to Unity
and Corona). I was previously waiting for Unity or Corona to partner with
someone like Parse but Moai appears to provide a good offering specific to the
social x mobile type games (ie DrawSomething).

~~~
toddz
Thanks for noticing! I work on Moai. Our goal is to enable game devs to build
great games, and to do that today you definitely need an online component. Our
differentiation from other services is (a) Moai is designed for games, not
generic mobile apps and (b) you can write and run your own code, in a gaming
friendly language, which enables you to innovate on game features.

Moai Cloud can work with any front end SDK. We do have several Corona and
Unity devs building game back ends on Moai Cloud. Robert Nay, the poster child
for Corona, is one of them.

------
fufulabs
Crimson Steam Pirates published by Bungie (the Halo studio) is very impressive
and done entirely in Moai

[http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/crimson-steam-
pirates/id43805...](http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/crimson-steam-
pirates/id438053238?mt=8)

~~~
pygy_
Shadowrun Returns, by Harebrained Schemes (the guys behind Crimson Steam
Pirate) will also use Moai. <http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/>

They raised $1.8M on Kickstarter.
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun-
ret...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun-returns)

------
cpeterso
Ansca Mobile's Corona developer tools are similar to Moai. Corona uses Lua
(including a simulator and debugger) and can publish iOS and Android apps.

<http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/>

~~~
pygy_
The Moai SDK has two big advantages over Corona:

\- is open source and free to use (attributionware, CPAL 1.0 [0])

\- It works almost everywhere: Android, iOS, OS X, Windows, and Google Chrome
(NaCl). The Linux port is in the works (they mostly need build scripts). See
[1] for more details.

\----

0\. <http://opensource.org/licenses/cpal_1.0>

1\. <http://getmoai.com>

~~~
catch23
In addition to these, one will soon notice that you can't really and write
some stuff in C to link into your lua engine in corona. The corona system was
probably done this way to make it difficult to shoot yourself in the foot.

------
rix0r
"Constantly pushing updates"

This sounds to me like their plan is to constantly be updating the Lua scripts
from their cloud server.

There's no way this would be allowed on iOS right? (Although I can see the
comparison with web pages running arbitrary JavaScript, which can also be
constantly be updated, but still...)

~~~
toddz
Also, updates doesn't always mean code. You need a place to push new images,
sounds and data files from as well.

