Top 10 Free Game Development Tools

Title pretty much says it all... *my* recommendations for the top 10 free (as in $ not Libre, although some are the later as well) tools for game development. So, close your wallet and dive in!

Link:

[Tdoshok]

While I do often see Top 10 lists as clickbaity, for some reason I don't see yours like that. Probably because they're genuinely interesting and useful!

[AlekseyLoykuts]

So many free tools, awesome engines... you want to try everything, but never finish a game

[mylegispotato]

You deserve more views. You are doing great job in helping indie game developers.

Love your videos <3

[LzBy]

I feel like git should almost go without saying these days it is so fundamental to development. Listing git is almost like listing a mouse and keyboard. I have been a full time developer for 10 years and if I had to go back to no source control or even a non-distributed source control system (SVN, SourceSafe) I might honestly consider a new career.

Great video. Looking forward to top game engines in order of preference ;)

[theministryofgeneralknowle]

Up next: Mike's top 10 wierd tricks every dev should know :P

[VideaVice]

Music is an important part of a game.

You mentioned Audacity which is mainly used for sound editing. I don't know many people who are composing with this program.
As you said there's LMMS which is a free composing software but still complexe for beginners.
Thankfully, for people who know absolutely nothing about music, (AND I MEAN BIG ZERO NOTHING), there's Bosca Ceoil.
You should check it out and see for yourself. It's free and extremely easy to use. The most noob friendly composing software I've ever tried.

[ragnorokgirl]

I know nothing of the actual game development process right now, so all of this is new to me. I always end up looking at the design side of the process and never the creation side.

[filipecoelho]

Ahah, I see that you took your own advice from the last video! Thanks for the hard work, your channel is just getting more amazing as time goes by!

[CouchFerretmakesGames]

I'm really glad you've included git in the list. That's just an invaluable advice for starters.

[DarkDao]

Cakewalk by Bandlab is free DAW, basically Sonar Platinum after Gibson killed Cakewalk. Windows only though.

[Devieus]

For audio production there's a bunch of nice stuff around aside from Audacity for sure. Of course there are the DAWs, LMMS, Cakewalk, Ardour, etc. But there's also things like trackers as an alternative to DAWs, Milkytracker, Psycle, OpenMPT, Sunvox, etc. Then there's sheet music programs as an alternative to those, primarily MuseScore, or programming language based music notation like ABC and MML alongside their tools and implementations.
Additionally there's Vienna, which is an SF2 tool, which is basically a sound bank with all kinds of features that isn't used as much these days, but can be used in LMMS and certain games as a way of having modular music.
And, you know, Audacity, which is mostly recording and post-processing.

[josesena]

A nice visual interface for git is SourceTree. Is created by bitbucket but it can be used on other servers as well. Make things a lot easier for those who aren't familiar with git.

[null]

If you are working with pixel art animation I recommend using piskel, it is a simple and effective pixel art edition and animation tool :)

[heathriley]

Version Control alternatives:
There is also GitLab. It gained in popularity after Microsoft acquired Github.
Another is 'gitea', which I'm experimenting with today. Hence this pedantic comment. :)
Additionally, you can run a local Git Repository on your NAS, with or without a gui for it.
Alternative to git itself, you mentioned SVN -- Subversion -- but there's also Mercurial --hg -- which I used to use, and liked better than SVN.

[maximorodriguez]

Another great video :). About vs code and the whole Microsoft debate and Microsoft hate trend, funniest thing is that nowadays you can argue Microsoft is one of the open source friendliest "big guys" out there, you should be more worried about what the other ones are doing ;)

[luismedina]

Visual Studio Code is the best editor at least for me! Improve in every new version and is an ease with a lot of language like PHP, JavaScript, HTML, YAML, GDScript or what ever, really awesome; and have a great performance, not better than Emacs but you now what i mean.

[mr_ways]

Great list, I'm glad you mentioned the little Paint.Net ! I love this image editor. It's simple, light, fast and It's just get the job done!

[bexplosion]

Krita also support vector graphics to some extend.
If you don't like InkScape UI you may like designer.io (Gravit)
Free DAWs (with VST support):
1. Cakewalk by Bandlab (as DarkDao mentioned)
2. Soundbridge.io
3. Tracktion T7

[evanjohnsen]

Righteous work on this list, thank you for putting it together.

[Henry_GamesX]

Some free programs I recommend are: Wings 3D and Fragmotion. Both programs are free and I like both programs because they are easy and beginner friendly modeling programs; I tend to like low poly and I make things very quickly with these. I actually got my own tutorial on how to use Fragmotion and I use Fragmotion to make my 3D animations. Thus, these are some of my ideas.

For 2D cutscenes in your game, I also recommend:
On this site you could make your own gifs and upload them in your game, etc. or if you want to make a gif for Facebook or whatever the occasion is this is a great and free site for that too!