Best Of Open Source Game Development Tools

Are you interest in game development but what to use an entirely open source set of tools? In that case you are in luck as in this guide we list the best open source (not source available like Unreal, fully OSI compliant open source) game engines, graphics and audio tools available.

Links
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[JimmyFraggs]

Timestamps for open source tools covered:

Game Engines
00:20 Godot
00:38 Stride
00:57 O3DE
01:20 GDevelop
01:48 More Engines

Art Tools
02:28 Blender
02:57 Krita
03:03 Gimp
03:12 Inkscape
03:20 Material Maker
03:40 Armorlab
04:27 ScultGL
05:00 Pixelorama
05:19 Piskel
05:36 aseprite
06:11 Lospec Pixel Editor

Animation Tools
06:31 Synfig Studio
06:42 Pencil2DA
06:56 OpenToonz
07:22 SpookyGhost
07:38 enve

Audio Tools
07:54 Audacity
08:09 LMMS
08:42 Ardour
09:13 Qtractor
09:31 MusE
09:51 Bespoke
10:05 MuseScore
10:29 Zrythm

[novhck]

Aseprite does not have an open-source license. It has a custom EULA which forbids distribution of binaries and is not OSI compliant. LibreSprite is a fork of an old version of Aseprite before the EULA which still had a GPL-2.0 license.

[raymk]

I'd definitely add some more categories besides the tools:

- Sound Effect Libraries: Soundly, 99 sounds
- Music Libraries: Free Music Archive, BandLab (also for making music)
- 3D Model Libraries: Kenney, Quaternius, The Base Mesh, Cargo
- Animation Libraries: Mixamo

Once you combine all the tools and the asset libraries, you're up to make your game with zero budget.
Use Godot, bring in Kenney's 3D models, edit some of them using Blender, then add some SFX and music that you edited using Audacity or LMMS. Finally, make some simple UIs and logos using Inkscape or Krita before publishing your game.

[yamiprincess]

I feel that Cake Walk is worth mentioning as a great open source Daw that was used by major studios in the past.

[da_roachdogjr]

Thank you so much for putting all these wonderful open source projects, under the spotlight, for so many years.
Much love ❤

[starwolf-]

My favorite tool for composing audio is OpenMPT, a "music tracker" which is a special kind of sequencer, but uses a vertical timeline instead of a horizontal one like most other tools in that regard.
While being open-source, it's not fully cross-platform, because it depends on MFC, so it is primarily for Windows, but has special wine integration for Linux and macos.

[chizyapochiponda]

Great video. Didn't have a DAW in my toolkit but I'm glad LMMS is available on Windows now. Last I checked it wasn't. Also I personally consider UPBGE/Range good open source game engine choices. They are what got me into visual scripting and I still use them to this day.

[RichardsVideosWoohoo]

Material Maker is great, glad more and more people are beginning to speak about it.

[MrBabygenius]

I came here to like this video, and ask...A lot of 'What' behind them??? That just made my morning. I'm glad you kept it in. Thank you for what you do here.

[lominero]

This is an amazing list. I didn't know about most of these. Thank you!

[kappilino]

I think you don’t need an extra sculpting tool if you have blender. Blenders sculpting tools are very powerfull and comparable with an standalone tool. And as a bonus you don’t need a pipeline to bring low poly base models in to sculpting for details.
The grease pencil tools are also very powerfull, for 2D painting and animation. The blender guys and girls did a whole short movie with it. Again with the advantage that you don’t need a pipline to bring 2D stuff from the grease pencil in the 3D world of Blender.
And the procedural shading system in blender is capeable for very complex and procedural shading trees, a viable solution compared to substance designer.
So blender combines several professional tools in one. It is not only a an 3D modeling solution.

[SpaceBroGabe]

Great video as always! Wish there was a section for open source video editing tools as well.

[anon_y_mousse]

Mike, I love your pronunciations, especially the attempt at Aseprite.

[WolfCatalyst]

This might be the greatest list you've ever compiled

[jefreestyles]

Thanks! Just in time for some game jams. Can you make a video about sub-tools that can help game devs like RegEx, JSON, linear algebra and calculus graphing helpers, name generators, etc. props if you go deep into the game engines' marketplaces as well.

[FlexLUTHORdev]

FANTASTIC and quick rundown of all these great tools! I'm working towards a 100% FOSS pipeline for game dev, and it's so inspiring that this is an actually achievable thing in 2023.

All these people have worked tirelessly to democratize the tools of game creation, let's repay them by making great things!

(and, you know... actually repaying them too. like with money. 🤣)

[philip_hofmann]

Nice thank you :)
Maybe something like Colyseus, Lance and Nakama (maybe also THNK) would also fit into this list of open source game development tools for multiplayer game server frameworks.
(I dont know much tough, just looked briefly into them since thinking about making an app for a card game my friend and I are creating. Would be an interesting journey. Could learn a lot since I dont know much, only did a project during it studies once where we made colt express into a multiplayer app game, using android studio and spring (so generic frameworks). Using frameworks like Gdevelop+Colyseus would be interesting.)

[sunbleachedangel]

Definitely saving this to my "useful for future" playlist, thank you very much

[AsatteGames]

This was really helpful and I have found many new tools I would like to use in my projects. Thank you for the video!

[Ragnarok]

Thanks for this, people really need to know the licences of the tools they are using. When the whole Unity debacle happened, some people believed that it was open source, so someone just had to fork the project and that was it...