Four Free Game Design Softwares List

Firstly gaming may look easy but game development is not! Have you played infamous, GTA 5, watchdogs? These are big commercial games. These are not created by a single person. A massive amount of people worked day and night for years to create these games. And most of them are based on heavily customized proprietary game engines which are closed for public. But luckily individuals and small groups can still create games with little effort using the below free software. Being free doesn’t mean it’s fully free. You can create and test it for free. And to publish the game you may need to buy the license. But these are a great piece of software to start your learning. Check the last part which I wrote earlier on how to get into the game industry. It’s well worth the read although my writing is bad :(

1. Amazon Lumberyard

Amazon Unveiled this beast few days ago. Lumberyard is a fully capable free AAA game engine. It’s been integrated with Amazon web service cloud and Twitch which Amazon bought earlier. The download size of lumberyard is about 10 Gigabyte. This engine can be used to create high-quality games. Lumberyard is based upon CryEngine but heavily modified internally. It’s now more like a custom game engine. The Biggest feature of this engine is it’s free with full Source! This means you can heavily customize lumberyard. This engine is fully free. The only cost is the amazon web service you choose to use. Also, tutorial is available on the official site.

2. Unity Personal Edition

There’s not much difference between personal edition and professional edition. Professional edition comes with more advanced features. The free version is not crumbled but features rich. It has everything covered. The best feature of unity is the Asset store which contains free and paid Asset. You can create 2d/3d cross-platform games with this tool. And the number of the tutorial to get started is huge. And there’s a large community always ready to help with unity.

3. GameMaker Studio- Standard

I can’t forget this baby. This is the number one game development engine recommended for hobbyists. This tool can be used to create excellent 2D games. The biggest advantage of this software is that anyone can start making games. And coding is not necessary. And it supports coding if you want to code. It has simple drag and drop interface with easy to follow tutorials. Anyone who just wants into hobby game making this is an excellent piece of software. The biggest plus of game maker is the rapid development. If you want to get serious then look for professional or master collection editions. These versions cost a bit more but contain more platform support. Tutorials are widely available.

4. Scratch

This is a web-based game creating software built by MIT Folks. This is absolute beginner game software to start with. This seems like kids software. But what’s the problem? This helps you with the learning curve. All you have to do drag and drop a piece of blocks to create animation, game or story.
That’s it for now. I’ll add more after more research

More Useful Resource if you want to get into Game industry

Pages