At the suggestion of GodzillaBlitz, I've decided to create a catch all for us crazy game designers/creators. Post what you're working on, ask for help, ask for second opinions, vent etc.
I'm also going to list out a bunch of resources in this post. Feel free to post stuff you'd like me to add, I'm sadly deficient in art and music resources.
Engines
- Unity3D
- Unreal Engine
- Amazon Lumberyard
- RPGMaker
- Löve2d
- Defold
- GameMaker
- Quest (text adventure engine)
- Construct 3
- AppGameKit
- GameGuru
- Adventure Game Studio
- Inkle Writer for text adventures
- Corona
- Twine
- Libgdx
- Spring: free 3D RTS engine
- Godot Engine
- Codea - iOS, Lua based.
- Magnum - Reddit Discussion
- Ren'Py which is a Visual Novel engine that uses Python scripting.
- Clickteam Fusion 2.5
- PICO-8
- Voxatron
- TIC-80
- DragonRuby Toolkit
- microStudio - a web-based engine for very, very simple games.
Books
- The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
- Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping and Development
- Artificial Intelligence for Games
- Game Programming Patterns
- Rules of Play
- A Theory of Fun
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Art Resources
- Kenny.nl
- Open Game Art
- Oryx Design Lab
- ZBrush Core Mini
- ZBrush
- blender Open source 3d modeling an animation (albeit an arguably steep learning curve)
- Krita open source 2d paint program
- 3D Coat (sculpting, 3d painting, UV,retopo, PBR) indie version $99 (sometimes $75 during steam sale)
- Spine - For 2d animation (not free)
- Photoshop
- Substance Painter (Texture painting software geared towards Physically-Based Rendering) - owned by Adobe
- Substance Designer (Cool procedural texturing/shader development software from same folks as Substance Painter) - owned by Adobe
- Alchemy is good for quick concepting and procedural fun.
- Marmoset Hexels is also fun, for a not-quite-8-bit art style.
- Maya LT (Not full-blown Autodesk Maya, this one's much cheaper and tailored for indies, with some caveats)
- Silo (Barebones poly modeling package with some great tools for retopology and UV layout)
- Shade - Shader creation on iOS. Paid options for exporting to either Codea and Unity 3D.
- GIMP - Open source and free Photoshop alternative (I can’t believe we forgot this one all this time!).
- Game Icons- Free icons for games, super useful for prototyping
- Deled CE - Simple 3D modeler. Web demo
- Coppercube 6 - Basic edition is free. It is also on Steam. Easy prototyping for 3D games (3rd and 1st person). Easy scripting. Pro version available for $$.
- Armor Paint - ArmorPaint is a stand-alone software designed for physically-based texture painting. Drag & drop your 3D models and start painting. Receive instant visual feedback in the viewport as you paint.
- CraftPix - free resources and paid ones, even a subscription option.
- Kay Lousberg - Game Assets - Similar to Kenney, this guy have some free resources, in particular his latest dungeon pack is REALLY good.
- REXPaint - REXPaint is a powerful and user-friendly ASCII art editor. Use a wide variety of tools to create ANSI block/line art, roguelike mockups and maps, UI layouts, and for other game development needs.
Sound effects
Music
Courses
- Introduction to Game Design (Free EdX MIT MOOC)
- CS50's Introduction to Game Development - Learn about the development of 2D and 3D interactive games in this hands-on course. Harvard EDX
- Udemy - Unity course
- Game Design and Development Specialization - Coursera, from Michigan State.
- 2D Game Art Guru lots of videos on how to do basic art.
- Interactive Programming with Python - Coursera from Rice University.
- Unity Essentials
- Junior Programmer
Other online resources
HacknPlan - Free Kanban boarding for unlimited people.
CodinGame - A site for honing programming skills with game based challenges. Also has AI challenges and a whole host of other things.
Code Combat
CodeWars
GameDev Market - Assets both free and paid.
Gamers With Jobs
Random Articles
Adventure Game Studio is a popular engine for making 2D point & click adventure games.
Interesting topic.
Great thread, Athros!
Can we add a few more game engines and a course to the first post?
Other popular engines
GameMaker (on Steam)
Quest (text adventure engine)
Construct 2 (on Steam)
AppGameKit (on Steam)
GameGuru (on Steam)
Courses
Introduction to Game Design (Free EdX MIT MOOC)
My skills are non existent, so I'll assume standard cheerleading position. Kudos to you budding game makers, major kudos!
Don't forget to add Twine on there!
Corona 2D game engine:
https://coronalabs.com/products/coro...
sculptris free 3D sculpting:
http://pixologic.com/sculptris/
blender open source 3d modeling an animation (albeit an arguably steep learning curve):
https://www.blender.org/
Krita open source 2d paint program:
https://krita.org/
Mischief $25 painting program (that may someday have sculpting as one of its member is the creator of Sculptris):
https://www.madewithmischief.com/
3D Coat (sculpting, 3d painting, UV,retopo, PBR) indie version $99 (sometimes $75 during steam sale):
http://3dcoat.com/home/
Two excellent books:
Rules of Play
A Theory of Fun
I use both of these books in my game design class, and they come at it from very different places.
My class tends to work in paper first: board games, card games, RPGs long before we get to a computer. I find that most folks get lost in the tools if they start on computer first. We often start by just throwing out random words and brainstorming how they could turn into a game. We try to focus on a core mechanic or system and build around that.
For example:
Unicorns, Gang Warfare, resource management
From this, we came up with "Lords of the Horn" a cardgame where you play the leader of one of 5 gangs of unicorns trying to take over the city by controlling the drugs "Orphan's tears" and "Stardust". Silly, but it worked pretty well.
So, to give an idea of how my though processes work, here's one of the mind maps for my current project.
Hey a fellow mind mapper! I use mindmapping for all my notes that I take at work. Usually just on paper and pencil. I find I can go faster with just that instead of with mindmapping software.
At first glance when looking at that map though, I'm immediately thinking "start smaller". Those notes you have already are outlining an enormous project scope.
Wow, that first post is impressive already.
I've never looked closely at Twine, but that looks useful.
I'm very much a hobbyist at all of this. My first goal is to make some sort of functional, bad game of any sort, then go from there.
I have 4 things published on Google Play:
Goblin Market: 1 player card game against AI.
Adaman: 1 player solitaire care game.
Word Search Blitz: word search against a timer.
DCSS Online: An Android client for playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on webtiles.
Goblin Market was a custom game engine I put together to learn game programming on Android while following the excellent (but outdated now) book Beginning Android Games which was written by the creator of libgdx.
Adaman and Word Search Blitz were both written in libgdx, while DCSS Online is more of a traditional Android app because it's essentially just hosting a web client and doing some trickery with keyboard input to make it work with the DCSS webtiles JavaScript.
What are peoples thoughts of the Udemy Unity course?
What are peoples thoughts of the Udemy Unity course?
I own it; I've enjoyed it so far. I find it a little slow paced, but it's also trying to explain programming concepts in addition to Unity itself. So for some lectures I'lll skip ahead here and there, but otherwise I like it.
Rykin wrote:What are peoples thoughts of the Udemy Unity course?
I own it; I've enjoyed it so far. I find it a little slow paced, but it's also trying to explain programming concepts in addition to Unity itself. So for some lectures I'lll skip ahead here and there, but otherwise I like it.
So as an experienced C# developer I might find it a bit slow then. I have a code to get it for $27 so I think I will go ahead and get it.
Here is the coupon for anyone else who is interested. Good until June 1st. Code is START046 which might be good for any course I'm not sure.
That looks interesting. A lot more content than the typical coursera programming course.
Huh. Going to bookmark this for potential future use....like maybe in the long winter months here if I want something different to try.
Spring: free 3D RTS engine - https://springrts.com/
My skills are non existent, so I'll assume standard cheerleading position. Kudos to you budding game makers, major kudos!
My skills are non existent, so I'll assume standard cheerleading position. Kudos to you budding game makers, major kudos!
My cheerleading skills are next to nonexistent. I'll shadow your cheering until I feel comfortable branching out on my own.
All kidding aside, I guess I'll live vicariously through whatever you guys post here.
Godspeed to evereyone on this post. May you all come out great makers of games on the other side and boast creative ideas to match new acquired skills.
Cheers!!!
What are peoples thoughts of the Udemy Unity course?
I'm enjoying it. I've taken about 15% of the course so far, and it does a good job of explaining the functionality of Unity. At the moment, it's a bit more like following a recipe to build games than it is learning how Unity works, but I feel like I'm able to make that leap on my own. I think when I get done with the course I'll have a decent understanding of the fundamentals of Unity.
The developers have been very good at updating the course, and they are constantly adding, tweaking, and updating content.
Well I signed up last night since the deal expired today. 30-day refund policy and all, so I'll tinker a bit this weekend and decide if I want to stick with it or not. Certainly looks interesting. And at least it got me to install Unity finally.
Eleima wrote:My skills are non existent, so I'll assume standard cheerleading position. Kudos to you budding game makers, major kudos!
Eleima wrote:My skills are non existent, so I'll assume standard cheerleading position. Kudos to you budding game makers, major kudos!
My cheerleading skills are next to nonexistent. I'll shadow your cheering until I feel comfortable branching out on my own.
All kidding aside, I guess I'll live vicariously through whatever you guys post here.
Godspeed to evereyone on this post. May you all come out great makers of games on the other side and boast creative ideas to match new acquired skills.
Cheers!!!
This is why a lot of people gravitate towards Twine, actually, because at it's most basic level it really only requires you to be able to write an interesting story and then tie it together with some very basic html style tags. Then from there you can expand and add sound, images, fancy stuff, etc when you get comfortable with it.
Really worth a look if you want to try something but have zero knowledge, time, or interest in coding stuff.
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