Best Mobile Game Engine? Thread

I am trying to develop mobile games, but I hit the bump in the road when it came to game engines to use. I run a MacBook Air with 4 GB ram, Intel 500 hd graphics card and 1.3 GHz intel core i5 processor. That means unreal engine is out of the picture due to their recommendations and I cannot buy a new laptop either. What is the best engine for 2D development and what is the best for 3D development. Will I be able to run any good engines or am I basically limited to xCode and making my own? I really want to develop, but I am struggling with the engine requirements and some of them aren't opening on my laptop (ex. App Gaming Kit).

Have you had a look at Unity3d.com ?

Edited by: TKAzA

I have but its so expensive, it totals $4,500 for the engine plus the android and apple compilers I was hoping there would be something cheaper.

A quick google came up with these, any good?

Gamesalad.com
Citrusengine.com

I'm not a developer, but I know bit information about game engines. gamesalad is quite good, but as long as i know it has one problem which is slow loading time.
You might try construct 2, cocos2d, stencyl also marmalade

Yeah thanks! Citrus engine looks pretty useful being open source and free I think I'm going to try it. I appreciate the help!

What I don't get is, does citrus require you to download Flash Pro? What's the catch? Most of these engines require you to download a million things.

Just a little note. You really don't need a licence with Unity to work with it. The free version does give you free publishing on any platform (aside from consoles which there is talk that they might drop the charges for or reduce it), here is the info. If you are looking for a simpler 3D engine there is Craftsudio

As mentioned before you do have all those engines. Stencyl is free as long as you export to Web, 99$ a year for anything else. GameSalad is a bit steeper.
There is also Game Maker that allows you to export free to the YoYo Arcade and 99$ for pro to export to Windows and Mac.

For a more extensive list you can check out this link.

Its not the licensing thats the problem its the compilers for apple and android are each $1,500 so it would be way too much for a small mobile app project, no way we would make $3,000 back so it would just be a waste of an app. Thats why we need a cheaper or free engine, but we are trying unreal engine now which is really good since its only $20 a month. Its really a pain to learn the blueprints though because theres not much on it online like an engine like unity, but we will manage. Thanks for the advice everyone!

This was already mentioned but may be worth digging deeper into, you cant get more free than free & opensource.

Cocos2d-x.org