Vex

In addition to the Unity starter post that we published the other day, I've been spending time putting together a big ol' resource list of free game engines/toolsets for beginners/folks looking to make a change or just dive into development.

I'm honestly really proud of this, and want to do much, MUCH more like this as part of my job: getting free and low-cost resources out to folks. I genuinely hope this is helpful for people and I'm very open to updating it with more!

This also happens to be very close to something I compile for my game design students every quarter (obviously this is a proper article version, not just a quickie list!) and, in doing what I want to do with service-y journalism at Game Developer... it just fit!

this term i'm teaching a semester-long version of what @turista and i used to call "the whirlwind tour" when we taught it to our summer program students—basically "here's a bunch of different engines all at once, think about what tools make different kinds of games, go go go"

structurally, each week i have students volunteer to scout ahead and find a game engine, make a small game in it, and then bring it back to the class and lead a short tutorial about it, then we all make games in that engine together for that week.

these have some overlaps with @danielleri's great writeup above, but i thought i might tack on the list of game engines with the ones my students have picked out—a good number of them i had never heard of myself! (at the start of the semester i gave my students @everest's wonderful tinytools.directory and told them to dig around, most are selected by them from there.)

1. plingpling / flickgame — these were my picks to start off the semester; plingpling is a simple pinball engine, and flickgame i usually describe as "hyperimage" a la twine's hypertext. i just like to start my students off with something that can get them making stuff IMMEDIATELY.
2. engine.lol — kind of a... cross between something like môsi that's spatial, and a very simple image editor? a ton of really cool constraints on this one, and i kind of love the interface that comes alongside it
3. decker — this one's a hypercard-alike! i've only played around a little with both hypercard and this, but of course slideshow-y tools have a long and cool history with being coopted to make games
4. pocket platformer — my students LOVE this one. i can't tear them away from making ridiculously hard platformer levels.
5. krunker — i don't love this one since it's kind of a walled garden and doesn't let you make standalone stuff, but one of my students has been playing/making/modding stuff in it for forever and wanted to present on it
6. herobook — this is kind of a stripped-down choice-based interactive fiction tool, less robust i think than something like twine, but interesting to compare, and i think maybe easier to embed images in the project itself than twine 2.x.
7. castle — also a little walled-garden-y, but one of the very few engines that is mobile-oriented, let alone works on mobile
8. môsi — i think one of my favorite @bitsy variants, with a really neat little music editor and a model of rooms built around continuity of space, a la a zelda overworld
9. twine — y'know. twine!
10. pix64 — a really interesting little engine that parses 64x64 .pngs that use a palette of 6 colors to make playable games
11. playdate pulp — another bitsy-like... or bitsy-lite, following the roguelike/roguelite distinction?
12. microstudio — this one actually hasn't been presented on yet, but has more emphasis on code-writing than most of these.

1. narrat - allows you to easily make Disco Elysium-likes. basically lets you make games that are half visual novel and half point and click adventure. super neat!
2. gdevelop - allows you to make pretty cool games without even needing a lick of code. sorta a stripped-down, html-based version of Clickteam Fusion if you've ever used that.
3. bipsi - bitsy, except not. haven't used it but seems neat
4. knytt stories plus - okay this one isn't a game engine but it's a really good indie platformer where you can make your own levels. it's super underrated. this is a mod for it that adds more features to the level editor and generally makes it easier to use. please play it