Which HQ commercial games are made with Monkey X?

Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Which HQ commercial games are made with Monkey X?

spintop(Posted 2013) [#1]
Can anyone list some high quality commercial games made with Monkey or Monkey X? Thanks.


Nobuyuki(Posted 2013) [#2]
everyone goes immediately to New Star Soccer for this. However other seasoned developers (many of them who previously published commercial BlitzMAX projects) have begun development on Monkey games as well. It may depend on your definition of "high quality" -- the standards by which certain genres are judged are different from others. There have been a few casual games developed with Monkey that have reached commercial status, but as far as I know there hasn't been a commercial-quality traditional desktop/console game released yet that is of note. Everyone reading this, feel free to correct me on that.

I've coded at least 1 F2P game in the past (with michaelcontento's IAP library, before IAP was part of standard Monkey libs) for my employer. It was a pain in the butt; we had pretty much no support for anything (outside of the forums, which to Monkey's benefit are filled with friendly and knowledgeable people). I don't believe it is a very successful game (I don't speak for my employers when I say this!), but I am proud of the code's quality and the feel of the project.

Until there is a wider amount of libraries and support for Monkey, a lot of the projects you'll see coming out of it are going to be pretty simple. It takes a large amount of effort to build up a framework and production chain for a commercial project with it right now, and to some people the existing frameworks aren't what they're looking for. Eventually you'll probably see some engine leap to the forefront of Monkey development, one that supplements most of the functionality you'd see in Mojo with things many developers take for granted in other languages. Frameworks like Diddy, Ignition, Flixel attempt to do this but none of them have reached a state of development maturity in my opinion that covers all of the bases for general gamedev that many users have come to expect to be readily available in other languages/toolkits these days. That leaves those gaps to be filled in by developers, and that takes time.

It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, really. IMHO it's going to take more traction in commercial development to bring up Monkey's profile among developers, and you need more developers in order to create more traction for Monkey in commercial development. It's been a trickle for 2 years or so now among the hardcore supporters and early adopters, but with the recent changes you might see some traction pick up soon. I can say for example that it's been over a year since I started on my own dev chain and framework for making games with Monkey, and only now is it at a state where it's finally starting to be put to good use by my co-workers in other projects. Each dev cycle improves it. More people working on the other frameworks available; improving them as people make their own games will increase the number of high quality commercial games being produced.

Question is how much sharing and cooperation is gonna be going on to promote more frameworks, and further development of existing ones. The current frameworks are on the right track with BSD-style licensing, but like I said before, they're not mature/feature-complete yet, and many of them are purposefully designed to cross-reference themselves in multiple places, making portability and interoperability of the individual components of the module difficult. Each dev who adopts one gets "locked-in" -- possibly a side-effect of each framework dev perhaps wanting to be "the" framework of choice -- and devs starts making their own adjustments to fill in the missing parts, creating a bunch of little islands of code that has perhaps slowed down the great proliferation of high quality Monkey-made games that has yet to happen.

We'll see...

P.S. on a semi-related note, it would be nice for Monkey to have a Unity-style "Asset Store" for things like this, including free stuff. Very few people I know use Modman, and the bananas folder is horrendously out-of-date when it comes to functional snippets like skn3's XML, AutoFit, and AngelFont. These things are sleepers waiting to bite the new Monkey dev in the behind when they find out their functionality's been changed, improved, or completely supplanted. I think the bananas should be examples only, and indispensable code snippets/modules given prominent places somewhere easy for new devs to find, instead...


AdamRedwoods(Posted 2013) [#3]
Zombie Trailer Park:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zombie-trailer-park/id398941864?mt=8

Crypt of the NecroDancer:
http://braceyourselfgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=122&p=1639

Titan Attacks Mobile is being written in monkey:
http://greyaliengames.com/blog/titan-attacks-mobile-developer-diary-4/

Railroads of America:
http://www.rvlgames.com/railroads-of-america.html


spintop(Posted 2013) [#4]
Nobuyuki,
Your explanation is in detail and let me(and other programming beginners) know more about Monkey X. The information is very useful
and I have much confidence in Monkey X.

AdamRedwoods,
Thanks. It seems that Monkey X is a programming language with good potential. Good games are good advertisements for Monkey X.


ElectricBoogaloo(Posted 2013) [#5]
Never judge a language based on other people's abilities! Whether you can make a good game is entirely down to your own abilities, not those of the language.
Anyone can use a saw and a hammer. Not everyone can build a house.


spintop(Posted 2013) [#6]
ElectricBoogaloo,
You are absolutely correct.


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2013) [#7]
there are also those dev's using monkey that simply don't talk, don't make it public, a friend of mine is in that crowd making commercial games with monkey but not letting on, its not that he keeps it a secret he just does not post about it, and where there is one, there will always be others.


Nobuyuki(Posted 2013) [#8]
How could I have forgotten about Crypt of the Necrodancer? That's a pretty good one.

Also yes, what Taiphoz says is true; I know that there are some pretty seasoned devs out there who are using Monkey buy aren't actively evangelizing it or post very often here. Whether that's because they simply don't have the time/interest to do that outside of their work, or just want to make it their own secret weapon before everyone else finds out about it is up for you to decide :)


spintop(Posted 2013) [#9]
ok.....yes.

One more thing, this Monkey X software should be more popular if some famous indie websites introduce it to the public.
For example, this website (http://makegames.pixelprospector.com/) introduces many game development tools but without the Monkey X software!


SLotman(Posted 2013) [#10]
Don't know if its "high quality", but my "Escape from Alcatraz" has an average score of 4.5+ everywhere, and its nearing 110k downloads :)