Question

I already have enough experience with android to make a basic game (like pong) but i want to make a professional game app for Android now. Do you suppose it is really worth the extra effort to use a game engine (such as Andengine) to make the game? or should i go without it?

Answer 1

It depends if you’re looking more to quickly produce the game, or learn something in the process.

If you want to produce the game quickly, you should probably look into as much middleware as possible. Writing engine/library code is largely unrelated to building an actual game, as evidenced by how many games use someone else’s libraries.

If your goal is to learn something and produce a game eventually, it might be worthwhile writing library code as you write progressively more complicated games – you shouldn’t start out with a goal to write an extremely complicated game right now and write the engine for it at the same time.

My suggestion would be to keep writing progressively more complicated games (maybe a Space Invaders clone next?), learn from them and then see if you are starting to reuse code and then perhaps bump that out into an ‘engine’. If you’re trying to make something really complicated it may be years until you get something playable, if at all, this way.