When starting a Game Development project, you may or may not think about the engine you will use. Unity you might think first, or Unreal Engine even. But there are more engine options you could use to develop your first, second or even fortieth game.
We can talk about so many options, from free options, to one payment or even subsciption based. So, lets better get started.
Unity Engine
Unity can easy be one of if not the most popular game engine for the begginer indie developers, using C# as the main language and having lots and lots of documentation, tutorials and articles on the internet of how to make a videogame, from the most simple mechanic to the most specific game, there is a tutorial on how to do it.
You can develop and export games to
PC (Windows and MacOs)
Mobile (Android and iOS)
Console (PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo)
Virtual reality platforms. (Oculust RIft, Valve)
The engine can be used to create 3D and 2D games, as well as interactive simulations and other experiences.
The best part is that you can develop on unity totally free, Unity doesn't charge you a single cent until you make $100.000 in the last 12 months.
Some games developed on Unity Engine are:
Unreal Engine
Unreal is another top choice for indie game developers and AAA game developers, and is known for its use of blueprints, a visual scripting system that Epic Games implemented on the Engine. But it is still recommended to learn C++ to have access to more advanced programming options. Blueprints are fine, but in the long run it can be limiting and confusing to read all that Spaggetti code.
Its can be used for 2D and 3D games, having a bigger preference on the 3D games, being naturaly more optimed.
Just as Unity you can develop games on:
PC (Windows and MacOs)
Mobile (Android and iOS)
Console (PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo)
Virtual reality platforms. (Oculust RIft, Valve)
Also if you are not only interested on game development, Unreal Engine is also a great option for animation and movie production, being used on The Mandalorian to create real-time hyper realistic enviroments.
Also, an advantage of using Unreal Engine is that it is also totally free to use... until you make $1.000.000 on sales (One million dollars) after that they will only take 5% of the income of the game.
Some games that use Unreal Engine are:
Godot Engine
Godot Engine is a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so that users can focus on making games without having to reinvent the wheel, its uses the mono code with C# language and has a direct compatibility with blender.
Games can be exported in one click to:
Desktop platforms (Linux, Mac OSX, Windows)
Mobile (Android, iOS)
Web-based (HTML5) platforms.
The advantage of Godot is that the creators kept the Game Development simple, no extra steps, no confusing tools, they want the developers go Straight to the Point.
The engine is completely free (and no, no royalties after some amount of sales) and it resembles a lot to Unity Engine so for begginer developers this engine is perfect to use.
Some games developed on Godot Engine are:
Game Maker / Enigma
GameMaker is a complete development tool for making 2D games, used by indie developers, professional studios, and even educators.
Is an amazing option for begginers because it has two modes of programming, the classical GML style with C# or using their own GML Visuals, to make it simple to understand what are you programming using boxes, icons and colors instead of codelines, and you can swtich between both views to learn the code and how it works.
It has its own Sprite Editor, animator and sequence editor to avoid the need of using third party programs to create your visuals.
You can create games for a variety of platforms:
PC (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Mobile (Android, iOS)
HTML5 Web
Consoles (Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch)
Game Maker Studio is a subsctiption based engine it can go from $4.99 a month up uo $79.99 a month depending on how many features and export options you want. Being the free version available only to export to Opera GX.Games.
There is also a free and opensource version of Game Maker, that being Enigma Development Enviroment, it is pretty much the same buth Enigma has more C Languages compatibility like C C++, also having a Drag & Drop feature to make the development easier.
Some games developed on Game Maker Studio are:
Construct 3
Construct is a full web editor engine, that means, you don't have to download anything, just open your favorite browser, enter the Construct 3 webpage, login and start making games. This engine is perfect for Developers with low-end systems.
It is so simple to use that even schools use construct to teach students the programing logic, because Construct 3 doesn't need a single line of code, it is all visual programming. You can create 2D to 3D games with this engine.
You can publish your games to:
Web (Newgrounds, Facebook, HTML5)
PC (Windows, Mac, Linus)
Mobile (Android, iOS)
It is also has a subscription based that limits the amount of features your game has (being a cloud services the more you pay more things you can do) Pricing can go from $11.19 per month on a Personal license to $425.19 per year with a Business account and $27.89 a year per seat every year on education plans, and also free-trial version to check if you like it or not, so it has lots of options for different purposes.
As a matter of fact I can really recommend this engine for begginers because my first game was made with Construct. The Lord of the Mop is a Dungeon Crawler made by 5 students with 0 idea of game development.
Some other games developed on Construct 3 are:
GB Studio
You may not heard about this Engine, and it's because is a custom made Engine made by Chris Maltby, a app, site and games developer.
GB Studio, as its name says is a Engine for Game Boys, no matter if it's an Original GB using a flashcard or a Custom Emulator by uploading them.
It's another option for beginners because it also doesn't need programming knowledge. It is on constant updates, and adding new features, like music editor, sprite editor, emotes and recently adding a GBVM scripting language. For more features better look into the documentation on the GB Studio page.
As said you can export to:
Nintendo GameBoy (all versions)
GameBoy Emulators.
This Engine is 100% worth of giving a shot, because it is FREE, but also you can help the creator by giving volunteer donations, so you can help Chris developing the Engine and upgrating it even more, win-win.
Some Games developed in GB Studio are:
HEAPS.io
Heaps.io delivers fast iterations, real development power and multi-platform compilation with native access and minimal overhead. The toolkit is flexible, open-source and free. It allows custom rendering pipelines for the graphics you need.
Heaps.io is used in many Ludum Dare games but also by big game studios. The engine was made by Nicolas Cannasse, the creator of Evoland, Northgard and Wartales.
The most important feature of this engine it's its optimizations and easy of use, being hardware accelerates, seconds-build proccesses and cross platform compatibilities, makes HEAPS a good option for small indie developers that seek for high performance games on every platform.
The engine uses Haxe 4 as its programming language, being a custom language that targets many other programing language (C++, C#, Java, Python, LUA and many others) to optimize the code as much as posible.
You can export your games to:
PC
Web (HTML5, OpenGL)
Mobile (Android, iOS)
Console (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch)
The Engine is an OpenSource Program, so it is also completely FREE, another plus for indie developers who usually have a tight budget.
Some games developed on HEAPS are:
*In order to install HEAPS is required to have Haxe installed.
Custom Engines
Well, if none of those Engines were of your liking, there is only one last choice for you: CREATE YOUR OWN ENGINE. Custom engines are great to create specific games with specific needs, because the engine will be completely optimized for that game. The downside? You really need to know how to program, but it is technically free for you to use.
Also making a custom engine and publish it in pages like itch.io or github.com would be a great adition to your Curriculum and Portfolio, showing you have a great capacity of programing and development, cause to develop a full game engine and then a game can take several years to make.
Some games created using their own custom engines are:
So there we are, we have SOME options you can go for, there are also many other game engines to choose, but to beggin with, these are the most user and budget friendly of all of them.
I hope this post would help you to choose or at least to have an idea of what engine to choose.
Walter Eduardo Rojas Rojas.
Game Designer & Graphic Designer
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