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From someone who is writing a game in his spare time, this looks promising, but not something that I will consider using. * First, I am put off by the choice of a proprietary language. I can tell you right away that I am not going to use it, not ever. A proprietary language just won't cut it these days. Sure, Lua has its problems, but they are not big enough to warrant inventing your own ActionScript clone, in my opinion. * Secondly, the front page says I can ignore LoomScript if I like, but it doesn't suggest what the alternative would be. I assume that it means writing directly to the C++ framework? If so, that's a crappy alternative. The attraction of engines like Moai is precisely that the scripting experience should so good that you could, up to a certain threshold of complexity, write an entire game without ever dipping into C++. * Thirdly, I tried to find the API documentation, but apparently this requires me to not only download Loom, but install it. It's really important for me to have online docs I can browse anywhere without jumping through hoops to get it. * Fourthly, the web site is very light on details. The Features page is very vague. It has a "gameplay framework", which I don't know what is. From the descriptions it's unclear exactly what Loom brings to the table; does it have support isometric games? Is it a scene graph engine? What about building 2D meshes, layers, asset loading, custom shaders, file formats, sound/audio? From the vague description it looks like Loom is "just" some glue for tying various libraries together, centered on Cocos2Dx with LoomScript bindings -- unlike, say, Moai, which is an engine written from scratch that integrates some external libraries (Box2D and so on), but all abstracted through its own native API. * Lastly, I didn't download it because the web site requires me to sign up. I just wanted to explore the code, not sign up for a license, so that's off the table. I am currently on Moai. I don't love the APIs, I'm not a fan of Lua, and I was forced into writing C++ code way sooner than I expected (not a problem, but it's for fairly trivial stuff that Moai should have provided in the first place, and only because Lua is too slow at maths/vector stuff). On the other hand, Moai is free, open source, well-documented (with online docs), fairly mature, fast, has good APIs, an active community, and Moai Cloud (the hosted backend system) is reasonably priced. In other words, I like Moai but I'm only something like 80% happy with it; it would not be terribly hard to entice me to switch to something better. If someone hacked up an engine on par with Moai, with slightly richer 2D features and a better language (Ruby! JavaScript/CoffeeScript with a JIT-based VM like V8 would also work) and a better physics engine, I would probably switch in a heartbeat. Superficial things like live reload I don't care much about. Just my thoughts. I don't expect they are representative of game devs in general, although I suspect you will find that the choice of language will be a point of contention among more experienced devs. |