Most games nowadays are developed using a 3rd party game engine instead of building their own in-house game engine from scratch due to time and budget constraints.
It is considerably cheaper licensing a game engine such as Unity compared to spending money paying developers to write something that may not even end up as good.
List of Games for wiiU eShop:
It could be argued that this is more of an in-house engine as it is mostly used by BluePoint games, but there are enough other games companies using this engine to keep it in this category.
Games:
The developer Frogmind used a very heavily customised version of the iphone game engine cocos2d-x to create the game Badland.
You can normally tell if a game is developed with COCOS2D as it makes heavy use of .plist files.
Full list of WiiU Cocos2d-x games:
In order to find if a game uses this engine decompress the .rpx file and if it has the showHavokBuild symbol it is likely to be built using this engine.
Known wiiU Games that use the vision engine:
The Nintendo Web Framework was by far the easiest way to develop a game or app for the wiiU. It was an HTML5 framework that has an interface for the wiiU controllers.
We have full coverage of the NWF framework here: Wii U Nintendo Web Framework · RetroReversing
The Unity engine was by far the most popular game engine for wiiU eShop developers, this was helped by Nintendo’s official support of the engine 2.
There was over 200 wiiU eShop games developed with the Unity engine, we have a complete list on the wiiU Unity section of the site here: Unity Game Engine Games on wiiU eShop · RetroReversing
Surprisingly there are only 2 Unreal Engine games that were released on the wiiU eShop:
Clearly the Official support by Nintendo of the Unity Engine allowed Unity to dominate the wiiU eShop market and Unreal missed out.
Some game developers prefer to use their own in-house game engine rather than use an off-the-shelf game engine such as Unity or Unreal. This page will cover some of the most used custom engines and the details we know about them.
Used by Shin'en Multimedia for the following wiiU games:
The have provided some details about their engine in an interview Shin’en Multimedia Mega Interview: Harnessing the Wii U power! - Dromble.
They claim to have used the same engine in 17 games which is impressive.
The 3d objects seem to the a file extension of .w3d, which could be the format from Shockwave3D.
Used in the game Chasing Aurora and can be seen in a video by one of the developers: (204) Let’s Make Chasing Aurora: #1 Slippery Peak - YouTube
Zen Studios have developed a custom proprietary game engine mostly used for their pinball games on the WiiU such as:
It was also used for their CastleStorm game which was more of a tower defence type game. So its not only suitable for pinball type games.
WiiU Games:
The EngineBlack Game Engine is used by the developers Wayforward to create beautiful 2D platformers, it has been ported to multiple platforms but the wiiU eShop games that use this engine are: Uses lua scripting
Tool to extract the game’s .pak files is available: https://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=10687
Used for:
Used in:
WiiU Games built with this engine:
Used for Coaster Crazy Deluxe on the WiiU, it was built using the same engine as Zoo Tycoon 3.
More information can be found on their official website Technology - Frontier
Wii U games using this engine:
Nucleas is the name of the game engine that was custom developed by Curve Digital 4.
Wii U games that were built using this engine:
The Storm3D engine is the name of the in-house game engine used by Frozenbyte 5.
Source code for some of this engine was available as part of a humble bundle 6.
WiiU games that were built on this engine:
Wii U Games made using the engine:
Basically the same app/game but with different assets but that technically makes it an engine. The list of wiiU games/apps are:
Ignoring the virtual console which are all emulated games, a few eShop games are retro games running on an emulator compiled for wiiU.
Known games with emulator:
http://bluepointgames.com/bluepoint-engine-batman-arkham-origins-blackgate/ ↩
https://developer.nintendo.com/tools ↩
https://nintendoeverything.com/interview-frontier-developments-talks-coaster-crazy-deluxe-lostwinds-possibility-of-3ds-support-and-more/ ↩
https://www.reddit.com/r/wiiu/comments/2kory6/we_are_curve_digital_developers_of_stealth_inc_2/ ↩
https://www.moddb.com/engines/storm3d ↩
https://github.com/Frozenbyte/Jack-Claw ↩
https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/80262-which-game-engine-build-dont-starve-unity3d-or-self-build-engine/ ↩
https://fatalframe.fandom.com/wiki/Fatal_Frame:_Maiden_of_Black_Water ↩
