List of free game engines
EDITORS PICK: Cocos2d - One of the leading game engines (along with Unity). Supports 2D. Cocos2d-x is the most popular open source game engine in the industry. It’s free, community-friendly, and cross platform supportive. Cocos2d courses on Udemy.
Ethanon Engine - Ethanon Engine is a free and cross-platform 2D game development tool focused on the recent video cards for hardware acceleration and shader effects. Any game style is allowed, from top-down view RPGs to side scrollers and shoot'em up games.
Moai - Moai is a mobile game development platform. It’s driven by the Lua scripting language, both on mobile devices and in the cloud. The Moai SDK can handle graphics, animation, input, physics, collisions, and more. Moai Cloud hosts your game logic, databases and additional game content, plus key services you need to build and administer great games.
RenPy - Ren'Py is a visual novel engine that helps you use words, images, and sounds to tell stories with the computer. These can be both visual novels and life simulation games. The easy to learn script language allows you to efficiently write large visual novels, while its Python scripting is enough for complex simulation games.
Ren'Py is open source and free for commercial use. It supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Android.
libGDX - Comes with batteries included. Write 2D or 3D games, let libGDX worry about low-level details. Publish your games on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, BlackBerry and HTML5, all with the same code base.
HaxeFlixel - Create cross-platform games easier and free. All with one codebase.
Openframeworks - The code is written to be massively cross-compatible. Right now they support five operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android) and four IDEs (XCode, Code::Blocks, and Visual Studio and Eclipse). The API is designed to be minimal and easy to grasp.
Cinder - Cinder is a community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++. Learn more about Cinder Cinder is available for Mac OS X, iOS and Windows.
SFML - SFML provides a simple interface to the various components of your PC, to ease the development of games and multimedia applications. It is composed of five modules: system, window, graphics, audio and network. With SFML, your application can compile and run out of the box on the most common operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and soon Android & iOS.
SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve's award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games. SDL officially supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android. Support for other platforms may be found in the source code. SDL is written in C, works natively with C++, and there are bindings available for several other languages, including C# and Python.
Torque2d - Torque 2D is an extremely powerful, flexible, and fast open source engine dedicated to 2D game development. Torque 2D was developed with OS X, Windows, and iOS devices in mind and works equally well on all the platforms.
Gameplay3d - GamePlay is an free, open-source, cross-platform, 2D + 3D game framework. It is aimed towards indie game developers who are creating desktop and mobile games.
Urho3d - Urho3D is a free lightweight, cross-platform 2D and 3D game engine implemented in C++ and released under the MIT license. Greatly inspired by OGRE and Horde3D.
Godot - Godot is an advanced, feature packed, multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine. It provides a huge set of common tools, so you can just focus on making your game without reinventing the wheel. Work inside a simple, yet flexible and feature rich editor, with tools popping up to aid you when needed.
Blender Game Engine - Blender is a free and open source 3D animation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Advanced users employ Blender’s API for Python scripting to customize the application and write specialized tools; often these are included in Blender’s future releases. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process.
Game engines with a free version
EDITORS PICK: Unity (free version available) - When it comes to making 3d mobile games, I don’t think it gets better than Unity. This SDK is used by big name studios and indie developers alike due to its ease of use, cross-platform capabilities and massive library of plugins and assets. Unity3D has also added support to make the process of creating 2D games easier as well. Unity courses on Udemy.
Marmalade (free version available) - Marmalade is the fastest way to build cross-platform C++ games.
Corona (free version available) - Corona 2D development kit is a favorite among many indie developers. It uses the LUA programming language which is somewhat similar to javascript, so it is easy to learn, especially for web developers. Corona can be used to create simple to moderately complex mobile games, apps and ebooks. The community around Corona is vibrant, helpful and active. There are tons of great 3rd Party tools to enhance the SDK as well as a plethora of educational materials out there to get you started.Corona courses on Udemy.
Xamarin (free on certain platforms) - Xamarin was founded in 2011 with the mission to make it fast, easy and fun to build great mobile apps. Xamarin’s products simplify creation and maintenance of high-performance, cross-platform mobile applications targeting phones, tablets and embedded devices running iOS, Android and Windows. Founded and staffed by many notable developers from the open source community, Xamarin is also steward to the Mono project—the open source, cross-platform implementation of C# and the .NET framework. Xamarin courses on Udemy.
GameSalad (free version available) - Create Games for iOS, Android, & HTML5.Drag & Drop, No Coding Required. Gamesalad courses on Udemy.
Unreal Engine (% based) - Unreal Engine 4 is a complete suite of game development tools made by game developers, for game developers. From 2D mobile games to console blockbusters, Unreal Engine 4 gives you everything you need to start, ship, grow and stand out from the crowd.
CryEngine (% based if you want to go commercial) - CRYENGINE is the leading all-in-one game development solution with truly scalable computation and benchmark graphics technologies for console, PC and mobile devices. By choosing CRYENGINE, developers can be assured that they’re ready for the future of gaming, and empowered to create standout experiences for PlayStation®4, Xbox one™, Wii U™, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Cry Engine courses on Udemy.
Construct (free version available) - Construct 2 is a powerful ground breaking HTML5 game creator designed specifically for 2D games. It allows anyone to build games — no coding required. Construct courses on Udemy.
GameMaker Studio (free version available) - GameMaker: Studio caters to entry-level novices and seasoned game development professionals equally, allowing them to create cross-platform games in record time and at a fraction of the cost of conventional tools! GameMaker courses on Udemy.
RPG Maker - The RPG Maker series allows you to customize every aspect of your game with an easy to use interface, making it perfect for beginners, while being powerful enough for experts. Unleash the power of RPG Maker to create your own RPG Masterpiece.
Stencyl (free version available) - Game creation toolset that lets you make iPhone, iPad, Android, Flash, Windows, Mac and Linux games without code. Stencyl courses on Udemy.
Project Anarchy/Vision (base version is free after one time payment (required for PC versions)) - Project Anarchy is a complete end to end game engine and state-of-the-art toolset for mobile. Project Anarchy also comprises a vibrant game development community. Project Anarchy includes an entirely free license to ship your game on iOS, Android and Tizen platforms.
AppEasy (free version available) - AppEasy is a new way to develop cross platform native mobile and desktop apps and games for iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows desktop. AppEasy is designed to bring cross platform native mobile game and application development to the masses using a simple web-like mark-up language similar to HTML and Lua. Our goal is to enable anyone (regardless of expertise) to develop their own apps for fun or for sale on a variety of app stores, including the Apple App Store, Google Play, Amazon App Store and beyond.
Gideros (free version available) - Gideros provides the cross-platform technology to create amazing games. In a couple of hours, you’ll find yourself building and running your next great game.
B4x.com (Trial version available) - Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools for native Android, iOS and desktop apps.
Which is your favorite Game Engine?
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