Last month I read a book, DOOM: The Revelation, and on a whim wanted to develop a game. To get some initial traffic, I decided to start with a WeChat Mini Game. Because I have no game development experience at all—the only tiny bit of experience is a Pac-Man game I wrote in C++ back in university—and I’ve never used a game engine, the first thing I need to do is research and choose a technical solution. I also want to try using a game engine to develop an internal MES system monitoring dashboard and to optimize the UI for some hardware device Android control clients.
To conclude, I ultimately chose Cocos.
Godot Is Not Very Suitable
Godot looks very reliable on other platforms, but the main problem is that exporting to a WeChat Mini Game seems to have a lot of pitfalls that you’d have to fill yourself. Although there are third-party community-maintained plugins, they are no longer being actively maintained. Even if they were maintained, I’m worried the experience on Mini Programs would be poor since many things are officially supported elsewhere. I want to develop a rhythm game that has very high audio playback requirements; if it can’t run smoothly, there’s no point. Lacking experience, I don’t want to fill those gaps myself. If it were for Android or Windows, it might be worth considering.
Cocos
This one doesn’t seem to have many problems — after all, there are related documents in the official WeChat Mini Program documentation. I asked DeepSeek and its confident answer felt off, like it might be biased:
Prefer Cocos Creator. It is currently the engine with the best and most mature support for WeChat Mini Games, almost without rival. Although Godot is an excellent open-source engine, in the specific area of WeChat Mini Games it still requires developers to “fill in the gaps” themselves, which is not very friendly to beginners.
In the Cocos Creator editor, WeChat Mini Games are a built-in one-click publish target. With a few clicks you can directly generate a wechatgame project package and open it in the WeChat Developer Tools for preview and debugging. This “seamless” experience is unmatched by other engines.
Cocos Development Language
In Cocos Creator (the current mainstream 3.x series), TypeScript is the primary and recommended development language. Therefore, exporting Cocos to WeChat Mini Games and the web feels simpler and more straightforward.
But if development is done in TypeScript, how can one ensure the client code isn’t decompiled?
Technically, it’s impossible to prevent client-side code from being decompiled 100%. By combining multiple techniques, however, you can greatly increase the attacker’s analysis cost and reverse‑engineering difficulty, making cracking uneconomical.
Decompilation Support
For mini games and native platforms, the Cocos engine itself provides bytecode-level encryption support.
- .jsc file format: When building for release, you can enable the “Encrypt JS” option to compile .js files into bytecode .jsc files. This approach is harder to read and modify directly than plain-text obfuscation.
- Open-source tool support: There are projects on GitCode like Cocos JSC Endecryptor that can encrypt and decrypt JSC files.
This approach is more effective for native platforms (such as Android/iOS) because the code is compiled into a binary format. Haven’t tested it yet—will test when releasing. Also need to protect art assets (images, models, sound effects).
Is Cocos Maintained by a Chinese Company?
I suspected that if Cocos had such good support for WeChat Mini Games, it was likely maintained by a domestic company. After checking, that’s indeed the case: the Cocos engine is currently developed and maintained entirely by a Chinese company. The technical origins of Cocos trace back to Ricardo, an Argentinian developer who created the Cocos2d-iPhone project in 2008, but Wang Zhe built the cross-platform Cocos2d-x based on that project in 2010, which is the real starting point of today’s Cocos engine.
How Cocos Charges
The core of the Cocos engine (the Cocos Creator editor and engine framework) is currently completely free, and the official promise is that developers will never be charged an “installation fee” or “runtime fee.” Its commercialization follows a “free core + paid value-added services” model. Revenue is generated through deep technical partnerships with super apps (such as WeChat, Douyin/TikTok, OPPO, etc.) rather than charging developers directly. This business model is pretty fair.
About the Author 🌱
I am a developer from Yantai, Shandong, China. If you have any interesting topics or software development needs, feel free to email me at: zhongwei.sun2008@gmail.com for a chat, or follow my personal public account "Elephant Tools", See more contact information