Starting the process of making a game can be complicated due to access to the tools you need. Regardless of whether you’re planning to market your first game or it’s just a project you want to practice on, free tools are essential for even trying to make a game.
Before we move on to specific examples, it’s good to know that most online video game creation tools offer multiple payment plans and their simplified versions are often free to use, so keep in mind that while most of these tools are free to the public, their full functionality will sometimes have to be paid for.
But since this is your first video game, we’ll hope that what may not be available in the tool itself, you can make up for with enthusiasm and effort.
We have divided the tools by departments in the development of video games, so we will present them that way in the following text. Let’s get started.
In this part of the video game production, the goal is to deal with the structure of the game itself, the basic emotional elements of its story and the gameplay elements that will be incorporated into it.
This work is handled by creative teams whose task is to conceptualize the story, levels, characters and the basics of gameplay mechanics.
Stencyl is a great entry-level tool for creating simple Flash games. Therefore, if you want to make something simple, original and 2D, Stencyl is a great place to start.
It doesn’t require coding, everything is more or less drag and drop and it’s completely free for practice, as well as if you intend to publish your game on the Internet.
For all other platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5) there is a price, which you can check on their website.
One of the disadvantages of this tool is precisely its focus on simplicity – more complex things will be more difficult to perform. All in all, a great first step.
How can we not mention Unity, which simply has to enter any list of free game development tools.
You can make games in a 2D or 3D environment, you don’t have to do everything from scratch, since Unity offers its own asset collection, supports every system and is relatively easy to learn.
As we mentioned earlier, Unity is also free but to a certain extent – if you choose a plan for personal use or if you are a student, it is free for you, which includes access to the tool but not its full functionality.
One of the less common disadvantages of this tool is that it has its own programming language, which can make things a little more difficult.
While the free versions don’t offer all the functionality, you’ll hardly need much more than what they offer for your first game.
Given that video games, as their name suggests, are primarily a visual medium, it is important to pay attention to their visual aspect.
That’s where our selection of tools that might be helpful for your first game comes in.
A completely free tool, open-source, with a license that allows for both commercial and educational purposes, and is more versatile than other 3D software. It really is fantastic for the first steps in your first game.
Is there a catch? Well, there is: Blender is not very easy to master if you are a beginner and the search for resources can take a long time, although users usually find a solution for that, considering its open-source nature.
Since changes to Blender are made by the people who use it, you can expect new versions every now and then, as well as occasional bugs.
And now a 2D animation tool with a pedigree. Opentoonz is an open-source tool, free for users and in its previous iteration, when it was called Toonz, was even used for the famous anime Princess Mononoke.
It offers exclusively 2D animation, both for commercial and non-commercial purposes, and the quality of service is said to be second to none.
Problems may arise with the availability of its support texts since it is made for the Japanese market, but even there you can rely on its open-source character.
No game can do without programming, so we did a little research on what you can’t create your first game without. Since it is necessary from the programming side to turn the vision of your game into code, this means that you need knowledge of a programming language, as well as knowing an engine, so we decided on the following two examples.
For video game programming, C++ is a language you can hardly do without. While it’s far from the only language in use for video game programming, some features make it a great first step.
C++ allows you to reuse previously written code, you can specify how much memory your code uses manually, it has a huge community due to its long existence and many courses are available completely free.
Although it may not be the easiest language to learn, it should be noted that, for example, Unreal Engine is written and created precisely in C++, which is a great introduction to our next example.
Unreal Engine is a legend of video game development and has been at the very top of the graphics representation since the beginning of this century.
Today, Unreal offers a license that is completely free for hobby purposes, with amazing graphics quality, simple C++-based coding (which is why Programmers often choose it) and has a name and history in the AAA industry on its side.
As a drawback we can say that the whole package of C++ and Unreal requires time to learn, however, we believe that this is not a problem if your enthusiasm runs strong.
Although the AAA industry has entire teams dedicated to sound design (just think of the excellent video dedicated to sounds in Mortal Kombat 11), we’ll turn to something much simpler for your first game. We will assume that it is important for it to have a sound at all, so we will stick to a simpler example.
We won’t go further here than a free, comprehensive and the simplest tool you can come across.
Freesound.org has a huge collection of both sounds and music that you can listen to completely free of charge on the site itself.
If you want to download them, you have to create an account for that, and most of the clips fall under the category of free use, which means that they can be used both for personal purposes and commercially.
It’s recommended, just in case, to check the license for each sound you like, which doesn’t have to be a problem if you just want to practice with your first game. If you want to publish your first game somewhere, then pay attention to what sound you use.
As a small conclusion to this text, we would like to encourage you to jump into your first game, regardless of how demanding an undertaking it may be. Considering that many tools are free, you can at least try to make something – which will surely be fun in itself.
Also, keep in mind that our recommendations are not the end of the road – there are many more tools! If you’re having a hard time with any of these tools, feel free to do your own research, you’re sure to find something for yourself.
And finally – good luck!
