Vex

I should probably try using this site rather than have this account and do nothing with it huh

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

i'm not good with words, so