Cocos Creator

Cocos Creator is a powerful game development environment built on top of the popular Cocos2D-js framework. Having said that, the full-featured app makes it possible for you to build both 2D or 3D games for the popular trinity of mobile OSes, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

It's also noteworthy is the fact that Cocos Creator comes with support for JavaScript and CoffeeScript, as well as Lua thanks to a plugin.

The application is available on both Windows and macOS, but there's worth pointing out that, in order to run it on the first, you need to make sure that Microsoft Visual Studio is present.

Getting started with Cocos Creator also means that you will have to log in using your official account credentials. Please note that when you run the app for the first time, you might be prompted to provide Cocos Creator with a Firewall extension.

Even though the application's interface is not what you would call outdated, it's by no means a modern one either, especially when you take into consideration the multitude of buttons (some of which are tiny, we might add) that are on display.

Fortunately, the layout is quite similar to other tools of this sort, with a scene graph on the upper left part of the main window, an assets panel on the lower-left, a scene editor in the middle, a Console/Timeline panel underneath it, and a Properties section on the extreme right.

Be that as it may, we recommend that you first download a sample project from the developer's website and thoroughly go through the comprehensive documentation or even try-out some of the provided tutorials. Since we're on the subject, you should also know that you can import your projects from Cocos Studio.

Evidently, the main highlight of the application is the scene editor that allows you to thoroughly design the environment for your game, followed closely by the built-in animation editor, which, as its name clearly states, allows you to create fluid animations for your game characters and scenes with the least amount of effort.

Taking everything into account, Cocos Creator is a full-featured and quite powerful environment that packs all the necessary tools for designing games for the most popular mobile platforms and, with a bit of patience and some time spent reading the documentation, even beginner can get the hang of it.

It's somewhat simplistic animation editor and other features thoroughly recommend it for developers who mostly want to build commercial and lightweight Indie games, although we are not saying that Cocos Creator can't be used for something better.