Editor-in-Chief at GameDeveloper.com, Berklee College of Music game design lecturer, BJJ Purple Belt 🤼‍♀️, hobbyist game dev, beginner pixel artist, sometimes screenwriter, fitness dork, volunteer EMT. She/her.


I updated my feature on free game-making tools with excellent suggestions from this here community!

Special thanks to @iznaut, @mrfb, @inbtwn, @bts and everyone who shared the piece initially! I'm planning to continue expanding the piece with other engines/resources/etc. and appreciate folks who took the time to send me suggestions!

I really need to check out Decker, Narrat and AGS, (in particular) from this expanded list!

Also: I'm compiling a list of free game art-making tools now as well, very much in this format. Very open to suggestions folks may have for that list as well.


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in reply to @danielleri's post:

If you're still taking game-making tool suggestions, I'd throw up Pygame as a contender too (particularly the community fork)! It's an older framework but still very flexible, actively maintained, and used to this day. It's nice for beginners because you only have to learn Python to start using it and that's one of the most popular and beginner-friendly programming languages.

As a sidenote, Ren'Py, which you've already included, is built on top of Pygame (although I think it supports other backends now too).