Okay, quick useful resources list: this is from the perspective of a hobbyist who wants to try stuff out, at a price point convenient for trying stuff out - namely
FREE!
Engines:
Okay, so its super common for someone to drop by one of these threads and say "I want to make a game, what engine should I use?" and ultimately the answer is always going to be 'whatever suits you'.
- If you're familiar with a language already, pick something that works with the language you know, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel
- for reference (common engines and common languages):
- UNITY mostly uses C#
- UNREAL mostly uses C++
- GODOT mostly uses a Python-like called GDScript
- PHASER mostly uses Javascript
- If you want to make a very specific type of game, there are a number of very specific type of game makers, that are super well designed to make exactly that kind of game.
- 16 bit console style JRPGs = RPG Maker (various flavours, all commercial)
- 2D point & Click adventures = Adventure Game Studio (free)
- Interactive Fiction = Twine (free)
- Visual Novel = Ren'Py (free)
- I'd personally put GameMaker (commercial) into this bracket, as its super good for simple 2D stuff, but you'll start banging your head against limitations if you want to go outside of scope, but you know, its good enough to make Hotline: Miami in
- If you want to sell what you make, check the fine print on what 'free' means. Some engines (RPGMaker, Game Maker) charge an upfront fee, or have additional fees for platforms beyond Windows Desktop (on top of the fees the licenceholders of other platforms will charge you), some operate on a revenue share basis, where you pay a cut of everything you earn (sometimes above a certain threshold), some are FLOSS and yours to do with as you want (although you may still have smallprint such as providing a copy of the source code with a release)
- There's other engines I haven't listed. It's not because they're bad or whatever, but if I haven't listed it, then I've never used it, nobody I know uses it, and I can't really vouch for it. If you find something great, champion it in the thread!
- Best possible advice I can give; all of these engines have some kind of trial; download all of them, make something super basic, and see how it feels. Are there awkward things to do that you can see yourself getting sick of doing over and over again? Do you feel comfortable with the basic user experience, or are you constantly wondering where the thing you're looking for is hidden? What kind of helps available? If you have a question, is it an easily located stack exchange answer away, or is it one other poor soul who never got a reply in some buried and locked forum thread from 3 years ago?
I personally work in Unity; the price point is perfect (I earn nothing, I pay nothing), I can export to any platform I want, my only limitation is a splash screen on my games (and - hilariously - the editors dark theme is also paywalled), there is
ridiculous amounts of support covering any type of game you could possibly want to make, including full frameworks on github, and the workflows convenient.
2D Art Stuff:
GIMP
yeah, yeah, 'I tried it years back, and its not as good as photoshop, and its layout is confusing' - it was completely revamped with v2.0 and is a genuine alternative now
PAINT.NET
Another 'photoshop-lite' that can do most of the things an indie dev (as opposed to a professional graphics designer) needs from a photoshop type program. It was originally designed to be like Ms Paint but less shitty, and its hard to argue it didn't succeed at that
KRITA
A free digital paint package, as in its meant to feel as much like painting but in a digital format, where other paint packages are more about digital manipulation or photo editing.
ASEPRITE
pixel art application;
its actually free if you want to compile it yourself, as its open source, or you can buy it as a prebuilt application
MS EXPRESSION DESIGN
Its like Adobe Illustrator (like,
really like. Like, an obvious attempt to clone it, like) but by MS. IT wasn't selling, so they just abandoned it. So you can have it for free now. That's MS for ya! Useful if you want to do vectorial art cheaply, and can't stand Inkscape.
INKSCAPE
Freeware vectorial art package. Tough to recommend for the same reasons it used to be tough to recommend Gimp. But, you know, its fully
functional.
FONTS
There's a bunch of font sites that are kinda sketchy on what kind of licence the fonts they offer to download are under, and whether you're legally allowed to, say, redistribute them without credit in a commercial game. This site has explicit licencing if you want to avoid potential lawsuits or whatever.
SHOEBOX
Like a swiss army knife for some common 2D tasks, especially for UI work - also has some helpful 3D related stuff, like being able to rip a texture from a photo of like a building or whatever thats not perfectly aligned
ICOMOON
A variety of free Icon packs downloadable as fonts, and the ability to upload vectorial art (SVGs) to convert into fonts; super useful for UI work that looks a bit more professional by having an icon instead of a text entry
TILEMANCER
Procedural generator to quickly generate 2D tilesets; can also generate normal maps along with the tile for use in 2D games using advanced 3D lighting, such as something like SpriteLamp can generate.
3D Art Stuff
BLENDER
Like Gimp, Blender 2.8 (which is literally only days or weeks away from full release at time of posting) is a
huge overhaul bringing it up to spec with other 3D art packages so you won't be going "why the fuck is RMB select?" or trying to memorise a bunch of unintuitive hotkeys to do basic shit.
If you've never worked with Blender, don't even bother downloading anything prior to the 2.8 betas for your own sake.
MAGICAVOXEL
Voxel based 3D modelling app / renderer - very simple to use, as its basically digital lego, and can be exported to a number of formats supported by various engines.
TEXTURES
Huge assortment of textures of various type, quality, and licence; has a user 'credits' system, where you get 15 downloads a day free, but if you need more or higher resolution need to pay.
NORMAL MAP CREATOR
Quick + easy online normal map generator from an existing texture
EFFECTTEXTUREMAKER
Procedural texture generator intended primarily for things like VFX / Particle effects
SPACESCAPE
Procedural texture generator intended primarily for making spacey 3D skyboxes
Audio Stuff
BFXR
A procedural sound effect generator, with a whole bunch of options to tweak, and a randomiser to get you near what you want quickly. Probably the most unrecognised superstar in every gamejam you can imagine, because basically
everybody uses this for those bleeps, bloops and blurps
BOSCA CEOIL
Retro-style music making package thats extremely simple to learn and use, and has a number of different MIDI instruments. Another gamejam essential.
BEEPBOX
An online chiptune generator, that makes sharing music as easy as copying the URL. Another staple of game jams.
FREESFX
Online generic sound effects library, using a fairly permissive CC-BY (attribution) licence - you just need to list it in your credits or whatever
LMMS
Free and Open Source digital audio workstation - extremely powerful and versatile 'full package' audio creation software that does tracking, sequencing, sampling and MIDI generation, and supports sound fonts.
AUDACITY
Free audio recorder / editing application. Pretty much essential for any audio cleanup work you might need to do
