Android game development in C#

Question

I want to know, is there any way to develop games for Android-based mobiles (and maybe iPhone) in C# ? Yep, i know about " MonoDroid/Mono for Android ", but well... it's not free. Java is great but Dalvik performance is far worse than Mono . And it lacks of some features that are very useful for game development such as operator overloading. Furthermore, there is OpenTK framework which is simply amazing.

So, is it possible to get running .NET/Mono on Android for free ? Or am I sentenced to Java ?

Answer 1

You would have to be able install unmanaged code on the device. I would recommend using Java, because I can foresee deployment being difficult with mono. Google might not let you sell your app on their marketplace with large quantities of unmanaged code. It would also tie you down to Android phones sporting a particular brand of processor, not much of a problem as all of the phones I can think of use ARM processors but there are some exceptions.

You could try http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:ARM if you are sure about this.

Operator overloading is simply syntactic sugar. I'm sure you are capable of writing applications without it. And Java can't be without its own suitable frameworks surely.

Android is overflowing with java and its most likely easier not to try and fight it.

Answer 2

If you don't want to use Java then you should use the NDK and C/C++; especially for games. An additional upside to that is if you think ahead a bit you can have a large chunck of code that works on Android and iPhone.

Answer 3

I am not normally a fan of offering something outside the limits of what you've set, but you should take this advice to heart:

If you are serious about Game Development I would invest time in learning Unity3D . The non Pro version is free and does not expire. They have iPhone and Android kits that allow you to deploy your game on both of those platforms. Yes they do cost money, but start calculating how much your time is worth.

If you are doing this as an exercise to learn how Game Engines work then that is awesome and you should pursue it. If you are more focused on developing an actual game, look into one of the existing kits. Unity3d is by far the easiest and cheapest kit for all the features it has.