Becoming an Indie Game Developer with Gideros Studio

If you are planning to becoming an indie game developer then you should give a try to Gideros Studio Studio.

Why Choose Gideros Studio to build games?

These are the main reasons to start using Gideros for your next game:

Gideros Studio is free and open-source.
Cross-platform to publish your game to multiple platforms.
Fully IDE to develop, test and publish your game.
Easy and fast game development, ideal for prototyping.
Object oriented programming is supported.
Your game runs at Native speed in every published platform.
Gideros Studio provides a Plugins system to extend it.
Active Forum to resolve any question.

Gideros Studio is free and open source

Gideros Studio is Free

Gideros Studio needs OpenGL 3.0 or better and at least 1Ghz and 1Gb RAM and runs on:

Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10
Mac OS X Lion or later.
Linux with Wine Emulator or compile from source code.
Raspberry Pi 2 or 3, compiling compile from source code.

You can download the Last release of Gideros Studio without cost. Anyway you can also Download and colaborate with this project to help to keep working on this project.

Gideros Studio is Open source

The Gideros Studio is also open source and available in the Github repositories, so you can study how it works.

Cross-platform

Cross-platform feature allows you to develop your game with only one code base, and publish it to multiple platforms.

The following is the list of supported platforms:

Android
iOS
HTML
MacOSX
Windows

Native speed

Gideros Studio is developed on top of C/C++ and OpenGL, so your game runs at native speed on every supported platform.

Additionally Gideros allows to develop native code for one specific platform with the provided Plugins system.

Lua programming language

Gideros Studio uses Lua programming language to help you to build your next 2D indie game.

Lua is simple and powerful programming language, if you already know another programming language as Java, C# or Javascript then do not worry, you will learn Lua in just a few days or a week.

In my opinion Lua is one of the easiest and powerfull programming language. Take a look to the official Lua web

For instance the following source code displays a PNG image at the position (100, 100)

local bmp = Bitmap.new(Texture.new("ball.png", true))
bmp:setPosition(100, 100)
stage:addChild(bmp)

Quite simple, isn't it?

Furthermore you can read the Gideros LUA API reference to know Lua modules and Enhancements provided by Gideros Studio.

Object Oriented Programming

Gideros Studio provides a Set of classes to follow a clean Object Oriented Programming approach when you build your games with Lua programming language.

The above example uses two classes, Bitmap and Texture to display image to screen.

The Texture class loads PNG image to memory and Bitmap displays the PNG to screen,write only 3 lines of code to display image to screen.

Gideros Studio IDE

Gideros Studio includes a code editor with project files manager, Lua syntax checking and find/replace tools to build your game without another external editor.

Create main.lua file as the starting point of your next indie game.

When finally you were ready to publish then Gideros Studio also allows you to export it to several platforms with no additional effort.

I've just developed my own Arkamania Brick Breaker game in just one month, published for Android and iOS.

Gideros Player

For testing purposes you will use Gideros Player with Hot Reloading feature which speeds up game development.

Change your Lua code in Gideros Studio, save and test your game instantly in Gideros Player. Repeat, repeat and repeat this process and finish your game without realizing it.

This is how looks my Flappy Creature game in Gideros Player:

Extending with Plugins

This is really useful when you need to integrate third-party libraries (Google Play Services, Facebook, In-app billing, Ads…) to your game.

Many plugins are already developed and available from Gideros Labs, but you can develop your own in case you need it. Usually Plugins are developed in C/C++ for all platforms, Java/Kotlin for Android and Swift/Objective-C for iOS.

You can read Creating Plugins for Android article for more information.