About

Writing a game for phones today is tough. You want as many people as possible to play your game, but every phone seems to have its own platform, language, and screen resolution. How can you avoid committing to the wrong platform and dooming your game to obscurity before you've even started?

The Cuttlefish Engine frees you from that decision. Design your game using the Cuttlefish Designer, and then ship that game for multiple platforms.

The Cuttlefish Engine writes the code for you. It generates 100% native Objective-C, Java, C#, or C++ code. This is different from every other engine out there - to use them you still need to know your platform's specific programming language. Cuttlefish is different! Using Cuttlefish is like hiring a contractor to make your game - you develop your game in the Cuttlefish Designer, graphically. Hit build and the Designer writes all the code, in all the different languages! You get complete source code for all platforms, which you're free to modify as you see fit. No more needing to learn Objective C to make iOS games. And best of all: no more expensive, one-off ports! Because you've built your game in a completely platform independent environment, just add your feature, and rebuild for all platforms. When a new platform comes out, we write a new builder, and you download the update and hit build. You're on that phone's market while everyone else is still writing Hello World in whatever language that platform demands.

Cuttlefish's founder, architect and, when time permits!, actual writer of code for the engine, is Mason McCuskey. Mason's a pro PC/console game developer with over a decade of experience shipping AAA console titles. He started writing mobile games as a hobby several years ago and never looked back. For the last two years he's been developing the Cuttlefish Engine... and has no interest in stopping!

Cuttlefish makes it easy to work with devices that have wildly different resolutions and CPU speeds. You can say, "On this 320x480 screen, use this 32x32 texture, but on this higher resolution screen, use this better 64x64 one," or "On this slower device, don't display these background objects, or use this less demanding particle effect."

Cuttlefish is not some webish excuse for a game engine. It is not based on Javascript or HTML5. It speaks the native language of each platform, and renders using the graphics APIs for that platform (OpenGL or XNA/DirectX). This means your game is a "full citizen," and doesn't have to run inside the phone's browser.

You sculpt game logic in Cuttlescript (a very close variant of C#, tweaked to be as cross-platform as possible). Cuttlescript never locks you in - it supports gateways to platform specific code, and you get full source code to the engine - extend easily and at will! For debugging - the Designer integrates some common needs, like seeing how many game objects are alive. But to step through Cuttlescript, you can use the Visual Studio debugger. Build your game for a Microsoft platform, and you can use Visual Studio to step all the way into the engine code. Or, if you're more comfortable in XCode's debugger, build for iOS and use that.

For more information, check out the features page, the supported devices, or the FAQ.