I'm writing an article for my site (Still under construction) on some of the cool new software available to game developers today for FREE. There's so much stuff out there these days it can be tough to keep track of it all.
I was hoping I could get a few ideas on the tools and software you use to get your games out there. It could be anything from SFML, Box2D,Gimp, Audacity, Unity, etc... anything goes. It's aimed towards beginners mainly but I'd like to hear of some advanced tools as well.
The main point of the article though is that it has to be free or open source.
Thanks!
Free Game Dev Software for Beginners
For beginners? GameMaker (Very functional 'lite' version is free), Kodu, and Construct.
RPGMaker VX (costs like $60) is cool too, but isn't free.
RPGMaker VX (costs like $60) is cool too, but isn't free.
Don't forget XNA and the Visual Studio Express editions. You can get a lot done with them (and even release your project commercially if you wish).
Disclaimer: I work for GarageGames...
We built this tutorial for brand new developers. The entire tutorial can be done for free:
http://www.garagegames.com/fps
We built this tutorial for brand new developers. The entire tutorial can be done for free:
http://www.garagegames.com/fps
SlimDX, free, powerful and open source wrapper for DX, even though DirectX isnt open source (or at least thats what I always thought), learning curve is nice, has massive amounts of content and stuff to learn, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn DirectX in .net, has a lot of free time and is comfortable with their programming language.
For beginners in programming it isnt a good choice but if you are comfortable programming (just new to game programming) and know your maths SlimDX is a good choice for .net and DirectX is a good choice for C++. Some people probably will disagree with that but from a personal point of view I found more out about games, shaders, graphic programming etc through SlimDX than I did through XNA, Flex, SL, Unity.
For beginners in programming it isnt a good choice but if you are comfortable programming (just new to game programming) and know your maths SlimDX is a good choice for .net and DirectX is a good choice for C++. Some people probably will disagree with that but from a personal point of view I found more out about games, shaders, graphic programming etc through SlimDX than I did through XNA, Flex, SL, Unity.
Author
Good stuff! Just the kind of thing I was looking for. Anyone else have some suggestions?
Graphics Gale and TileStudio are awesome tools for 2D game arts creation. Sprite Sheet Packer is a awesome tool for packing your art.
Author
Hey thanks for leads guys! I'm still adding content but I should have a few articles up in the next week or so about some of the tools I've found. You can check out my site here. Thanks!
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