These are the tools I tend to use for game production, and whose developments I will follow in this blog. First I will go through some game engines, then graphical utilities.
- Adventure Game Studio - "allows you to create your own point-and-click adventure games, similar to the early 90's Sierra and Lucasarts adventures. It consists of an easy-to-use development environment, and run-time engine."
What this means is that you can basically make your own adventure game, akin to Leisure suit Larry, Monkey Island, Day of the tentacle, without having to program a single peace of code! Just supply the artwork, make up an idea for a story, and click away! Of course, if you want to go more advanced you can customize pretty much anything with the help of AGS's powerful script language! And all this is FREE?! Yes, sirree!
- Wintermute - This adventure game engine used to be commercial, but later has been converted to freeware, and the sources are available and GPL even. Even if AGS has been king of the throne for the last couple of years, Wintermute has made great strides - and judging from the games made with it, it´s just as capable, if not more - at the cost of a bit more laboreous workflow. It´s featureset is pretty much the same as AGS. One advantage is that it´s 2.5D, i.e you can import 3D-characters to use in your games. It also seems to work better with scaling and alphas than AGS. The developer is now working on a new engine, fittingly named WME2 (Wintermute Engine 2) which might be full 3D - unfortunately, it might also be commercial, which means that for the most of us, we will have to stick WME 1.9.1, released in january of 2010. But in all honesty, for most of us, it is also enough.
- DAGE - is a quite recent addition to the scene, but already shows much promise. The engine is full 3D, which makes it different from the previous two engines. Featurewise, it´s the least complete, but is being actively developed, with new testreleases coming out frequently. If 3D is your thing, this is the one to keep an eye on over the next year.
- Blender - by far the most powerful free 3d solution available. It´s been in development since the mid 90s, but only as opensource since 2002. It has a dedicated roster of developers, who code new features on their freetime, and has made amazing strides in just the last couple of years. Major features: Robust, fast modeling toolset. Rigging and character animation. Some of the best UV-mapping available. Raytracing, Subsurface scattering. Particles, Hair, Cloth, Softbody and Hardbody physics, Fluids, Smoke. Built-in compositor and capable game-engine. Scriptable features through Python, exporters and importers for a wide variety of 3d formats. And the best part? Development seems to be accelerating faster each year. If the UI is daunting, rest assured that this is being addressed in the monumental 2.5-series which will be wrapped up mid-2010. Having tried the development versions, I can say that I will never look back. You can check out a modeling tutorial for Blender I did a couple of years ago by clicking here.
- Wings 3D - is a very powerful subdivision modeller, based upon the old Mirai 3D package, which was the modeller of it´s day. Wings 3d has come alot further though, and is free - so there´s really no reason not to use it.
- The Gimp - Undoubtedly the most powerful free image-editing software. It still has some quirks I´m not comfortable with, but it still deserves to be on the list since most people don´t have access to Adobe Photoshop.
- MyPaint - A paintprogram allowing you to emulate real paintbrushes and pencils a la corel painter. Neat little app, especially with my newly purchased Wacom Bamboo Fun graphics tablet.
- GraphicsGale - A 2D pixelpushing program with some advanced features, like layers and animation.
