Marmalade SDK – game engine review

Programming language: C++ and Lua (using Marmalade Quick)

Official site: http://www.madewithmarmalade.com/

I spent some considerable time looking at Marmalade and reading through the ‘Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials‘  book. Marmalade looks like it would comfortably do what I need as it can be used to do 2D or 3D content. There is a 30 day free trial and the licencing is such that the basic annual fee would be £150. There is some support for ads and IAPs. With Marmalade you don’t need access to a Mac in order to do builds for iOS – which is major plus. You will still need iOS devices for testing on though.

As part of reading the ‘essentials’ book and being new to the type of rendering that most game engines do (it being different to Flash) I found I had many questions that weren’t answered by the ‘essentials’ book (understandably as it’s not a beginner’s guide) but then also struggled to find answers in the Marmalade resources or third party sites. There appeared to be relatively few sites with answers or learning resources for Marmalade. What I did find, if I didn’t restrict my searching to Marmalade only, was answers coming from the Unity community.

Summary
Marmalade does look fantastic but, as I’m new to this type of games development, the lack of resources is a concern. The main issue though is that the free trial is only 30 days and as explained in the main article, this makes it difficult to assess in the actual time I have available.

Back to Game Engine review