Develop a video game and making it fulfill the goal of “being played” by many people, can be an exhaustive and somewhat expensive task. Although if you and your team (or if you are “alone against the world”: p) are passionate about their respective activities, the “exhaustive” part will take second place, and starting from the fact that you have a computer and an internet connection, with this post we will make the “expensive” become totally “Free” (one of the best words in the world 😀 ).
Next, we will state what we think are the main “Free” tools that you can use to make Video Games like a “Pro”:
Game Engines.
- With Unity you can create virtually any type of video game you can imagine and for a wide variety of platforms (in addition to having a lot of information on the web about its use).
- Unreal Engine is a “famous” and very “powerful” engine that allows you to make “amazing” video games for a wide selection of platforms.
- Finally we have Godot, another great game engine, very simple to use in which you can create “fabulous” video games in both 2D and 3D.
- In addition to the discussion forums belonging to each game engine, you can always visit GitHub to find answers about the problems that may arise while coding.
Graphic Design and 3D Modeling.
- The “powerful” Blender is one of the best tools you should have if the creation of 3D models is involved (models creation, animation, video editing, and many other features);is free, and has a huge library of tutorials distributed throughout the internet (so there will be no problem to master it).
- For 2D graphics and vector design, Inkscape and Gravit Designer they are “excellent” tools that will be of great help for you (and the amount of information on how to use them is vast).
- If you need to speed your work, you can also make use of the hundreds of resources you can find in the following links (remember to read and pay attention to the licenses that creators assign to their works, although the resources are free, in some cases the creators would ask you to mention them in your games or that their work has not to be used for commercial purposes) :
- Free3D y Poly (for 3D models).
- Freepik y Stockio (for vector design).
- Game Art 2D, OPP, y Kenney (for 2D sprites).
- Google Fonts y 1001 Free Fonts (for fonts).
Audio Production.
- With LMMS you can make your own music and sound effects for your games.
- Audacity will give you everything you need related to audio editing.
- Like in the previous section, if you need to download resources, the following links will be very helpful:
- Free Sound, 99 Sounds y Play on Loop (for downloading themes and sound effects).
Video Production.
- If you need to create a game play, OBS Studio and FlashBack Express are great solutions for screen recording.
- Now, to make a “kick-ass” trailer, HitFilm Express will be very helpufl.
- To get a huge variety of video resources (like backgrounds and special effects), Videvo is a place you have to visit .
Publishing and Marketing.
As above mentioned, our video game has the main objective of “being played” by many people; so, we have to “Publish” it and develop all “Marketing” necessary so that people know it, play it and finally love it 😛 .
Marketplaces to Publish.
- Create an Amazon account to publish your games for free (Android, PC and Mac games).
- Also you can develop and publish game for Facebook.
- At Aptoide you can publish Android games.
For Marketing.
- The best way to let the world knows all your creations is by using the social networks, so, hurry up and start creating your Facebook, Twitter y YouTube accounts.
We hope these tools will be of great help to you in the video games creating and publishing process . We will continue testing more resources to be able to recommend them in this post.
Remember to take a look at our “All Games” section, you will find awesome mobile games, you will enjoy them 🙂 .
Nice post. Keep it up.