Develop mobile games for dummies

[fehu]

Hi
I have a little idea for a little game suitable for mobile, just as a pet/learning project, with a top-down low-poly 3d view similar to the first GTA.

But I've never worked on a game, my programming background is really desktop/server oriented, the only thing that I know about swift is that I have no intention of learning it, and I know java but don't like too much the idea of missing completely fruit shaped devices.

The nearest left option is javascript. Yes, it sucks but a little less than you remember.
After some research, I've come to Babilon.js

Babylon.js: Powerful, Beautiful, Simple, Open - Web-Based 3D At Its Best

Babylon.js is one of the world's leading WebGL-based graphics engines. From a new visual scene inspector, best-in-class physically-based rendering, countless performance optimizations, and much more, Babylon.js brings powerful, beautiful, simple, and open 3D to everyone on the web.

www.babylonjs.com

Do you know a better one?
Do you think that it has all that I need?

 

[orangpelupa]

From a quick read, It sounds good. It also can directly import from figma for UX. So it should be good/fast development, assuming you are fine with figma.

But I never make games via programming. I always use visual game development, so zero programming. Unreal is confusing, construct 2 and 3 are easy, gdevelop seems more advanced than construct but also more confusing...

So sorry, can't recommend any :/

 

[JoeJ]

I made a mobile game for both iOS and Android. Code was all C++, only with some OS stuff left to Objective C and Java (actually loading files, multi threading and audio in my case). Basically i made in on Windows, occasionally testing it on the mobiles.
On the Apple side, i have never learned the Objective C language at all. OS code was not much so trial and error was enough. I also used a Hackintosh running on a Virtual Machine, which worked. (Not legal, but i would have a real Mac Mini in the basement. )
On Android i have used NDK to support C++.
That was >10 years ago. Things have changed, but not too much i guess.

But it's surely a bit frustration to set all things up, and you'd need to do all graphics yourself so learning OpenGL API.
I'd look at various cross platform game engines and frameworks first. Unity for example. Babylon.js looks fine as well, but idk and can't recommend anyone either.

 

[fehu]

C++ is a lot beyond my capabilities.
I was going for javascript because there are frameworks like Flutter or React Native that allow for multiplatform development and compile to native blob.
Learning to use them can be a nice skill in the future.
At worst I can make a native webview wrapper and run javascript in it.