Free resources for making games

UPDATE: See also the libre assets list I’ve started building on Itch.io. For assets, it’s a more updated, more comprehensive list.

I got a little carried away while assembling a list of game-development resources as an activity for a course I’m taking, so I decided to share them. Enjoy.

Everything listed is free enough (in both senses of the word) to be used, royalty-free in a commercial or open-source project and can be used to produce games which, at minimum, target Windows, Linux, and OSX. With a few minor exceptions, which are noted, all tools also run on any of those three.

Note: This is only a portion of the list I maintain for my own use. If you don’t see what you want, feel free to ask me to check my bigger, more cluttered private list.

Articles (Sample Platter):

• A* Pathfinding for Beginners
• A CRT Filter Without Shaders
• Flash is Dead, long live OpenFL (Based on Haxe, a statically-typed ActionScript derivative which can compile to SWF or native code. Used by games like Papers, Please. If you’re a Windows user, it works well with FlashDevelop.)
• Gamasutra – How To Make Insane, Procedural Platformer Levels
• Gamasutra – Intelligent Mistakes: How to Incorporate Stupidity Into Your AI Code

Free Game Engines:

• Godot (Free competitor to Unity. Has a built-in IDE.)
• Panda3D (3D game engine developed by Disney specifically to enable high-quality games to be written in Python)
• The Frogatto Engine (Anura) (Really impressive built-in level editing and dynamic reprogramming capabilities. Primarily targeted at 2D platformers, but can be repurposed.)
• Sauerbraten and BananaBread (A Quake-like 3D game engine with as-you-play level editing and a WebGL port)
• Various iD Tech engines that have been open-sourced
• Spring Engine (Open-source 3D real-time strategy game engine)
• EasyRPG (Open-source clone of the RPG Maker 2000/20003 editor and player. See MKXP for a clone of the RPG Maker XP runtime only.)
• Adventure Game Studio (Open-source editor and engine for 2D games in the style of King’s Quest and Monkey Island. Editor runs on Windows. Engine ported to all major platforms.)
• Ren’Py (The most popular engine for English-language visual novels and related types of games)
• TADS (The most advanced engine for interactive fiction (text adventures), supporting rich text, illustrations, ambient sounds, hyperlinks, etc. The IDE is is Win32-only, but a fully-portable command-line toolchain is available and the IDE can be run in Wine if you use winetricks to install IE6.)

Free 3D Engines and Game Frameworks:

• OGRE 3D (Highly-extensible, modular 3D engine as used by games like Torchlight and The Book of Unwritten Tales)
• Irrlicht (3D engine used in proprietary games like Octodad and open-source ones like SuperTuxKart)
• SDL 2.0 (The big name in providing a portable alternative to DirectX. With add-ons like SDL_mixer, the Render API provides a higher-level 2D experience comparable to Allegro)
• HaxeFlixel (Port of the Flixel 2D engine from ActionScript to Haxe, a statically-typed derivative which compiles to SWF or native code)
• Moai SDK (used by Broken Age. A.K.A. The DoubleFine Adventure)
• MonoGame (Open-source XNA 4.0 clone for C# games. Used to port games like Bastion, Escape Goat, and Fez to non-Windows OSes. See MonoGame-SDL2 for best Linux backend.)
• LWJGL (Portable Java game library used by Minecraft.)

Free Resources:

• OpenGameArt.org
• The Open Game Art Bundle (Free art, music, and more)
• Arcen Games – Free Graphics for Indie Developers
• Pixel Art by J.M. Silveira Neto
• Royalty-Free Music
• Free Public Domain Music
• ccMixter: Music for Video Games
• freesound.org (Audio Samples for stuff like sound effects, CC-licensed or Public Domain)
• CGTextures (Library of textures for 3D modelling that you’re allowed to use as long as you only redistribute them as part of something like a game or movie. See the point-form list in the license for details.)
• FreePats (Compilation of free instrument samples for composing your own music)
• Public domain art on the British Library’s Flickr profile

Relevant Steam Dev Days Talks:

• Getting Started With Linux Game Development
• Game Development With SDL 2.0
• Getting Started Debugging on Linux
• Moving Your Games to OpenGL (Includes a lot of “Why you should”)

IDEs:

• Qt Creator (The free, portable, mature C/C++ IDE that Valve apparently prefers.)
• Code::Blocks (Open-source IDE for C/C++/Fortran. Alternative to Qt Creator that’s easier to learn in some ways and harder in others.)
• ZeroBrane Studio (Lua IDE which integrates with engines like the aforementioned Moai)
• FlashDevelop (Open-source IDE for ActionScript and Haxe. Windows-only but Wine-compatible, including a helper app to bridge it into the native Linux/OSX desktop.)
• MonoDevelop (Open-source IDE for .NET, well-suited to MonoGame development.)
• Eclipse (Open-source IDE written in Java. Widely considered to be heavy and bloated, so I only suggest using it for Java projects, rather than other languages for which better IDEs exist.)

Tools:

• rx (Minimalist open-source sprite editor designed )
• Audacity (Free, open-source, cross-platform audio editor)
• Git Extensions (An easy-to-install Windows distribution of the Git revision control system which provides comprehensive GUIs.)
• Krita and MyPaint (Free, open-source digital painting tools which compete with Corel Painter and SAI… unlike GIMP which is even more specialized as a photo-retoucher than Photoshop.)
• LMMS (Free, open-source, cross-platform music-composing tool. Ardour is even more powerful but only works on Linux and OSX and has a bit of a learning curve.)
• TileEd (Free, open-source level/map editor for when you’re building your own game engine)
• VirtualBox (Free, open-source competitor to VMWare. Has guest 3D drivers, which make it an easy way to quickly test new game builds on other platforms.)

Tools (3D):

• Blender (Free, open-source professional-quality 3D modelling tool with built-in game engine and non-linear video editor.)
• GtkRadiant and QuArK (Level editors for games based on the various iD Tech engines that have been open-sourced over the years)
• MakeHuman (Free, open-source tool for generating humanoid 3D models quickly and easily)
• ngPlant, Arbaro, Ivy Generator (Free, open-source, parametric generation of 3D plant models. There also exist plugins for this in the Blender plugin browser.)
• Terraineer, HME, and Picogen (Cross-platform, open-source terrain heightmap generators and/or editors. Geomorph and Terraform also exist, but they’re Linux-only.)
• Wings 3D (Free, open-source subdivision modelling tool which may be easier to learn than Blender when that’s all you need.)

Free, Open-Source Installer Generators:

• NSIS (As used by many many Windows programs and games)
• InnoSetup (The other big, free installer generator. Used by all GOG.com Windows releases)
• install.sh for Linux tarball releases (My own creation, so you can ask me for help with it. Used by the Linux releases of games like SteamWorld Dig and Desktop Dungeons)
• Mojo Setup (For when you really need a binary Linux installer package… but I had to hack together my own “unpack it without running the install scripts” tool like cabextract or innoextract for it, so expect to piss off people like me if this is the only option you offer.)

Services Free to Projects Which Open-Source Their Code on GitHub:

• GitHub itself (code hosting, issue tracker, wiki, release hosting, statically-templated web hosting)
• Travis-CI (Linux-based continuous integration test service)
• Appveyor (Windows-based continuous integration test service)
• Coveralls (code coverage reporting and analysis for Travis-CI)
• Coverity Scan (Static code analysis for C, C++, and Java)
• Waffle.io (Trello-like project management UI based on GitHub issues)
• Gitter.im (Project chat room host with GitHub integration, mobile apps, and an optional bridge so people can connect with IRC clients.)

Enjoy. 🙂

P.S. Remember that this list is not exhaustive. I have a much bigger and more comprehensive list that I haven’t had time to polish up and I’d be happy to answer questions if this is missing something you need.

Free resources for making games by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.