I'm just pooling together some resources for game developers, so I'd love to hear what has helped you personally! I'm new here, so sorry if this is in the wrong place. Anything from game assets, to marketing/social media tools, to game engines - or anything else - is welcome :)
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Free or low-cost resources that have helped you
A lot of stuff ... I don't have the energy to dump links at the moment, maybe later this week or next.
I only use Free software.
Well, OK, that's a slight lie because some of the firmware and codecs in my systems are non-free, but between all my tools being Free and gratis and all of the free resources in the internet, you never actually have to pay for something to develop games.
GIMP and Wings3D were used by me to learn modding games. They are no cost and modding is no cost. It's a great way to learn about game design and game structure. Blender came later and helped me to learn about things like shaders, rigging, animation, etc. Taking a basic game that you made and modding or letting others mod it will teach you a lot about asset optimization, workflow, and much more.
Later I used community or student versions of Maya, 3D Max, and Visual Studio. Don't spend too much time in one area, but broaden your knowledge base. You must work hard to keep progress going.
DuckDNS - free dynamic domains (although I did make a donation)
Turbosquid - Free 3d models
https://byet.host/free-hosting - for free hosting of small php sites (leaderboards)
Openshift - free hosting for more complex web-apps. (can run many languages and databases) [ uses more mainstream tech then google-app-engine]
IDEs - Webstorm/Pycharm/Netbeans/Visual-Studio.
GIMP - For phpotoshoping
(( internet is being bad - I'll add links and other stuff later if I remember ))
Game Engines
- Unity
- Unreal
- Alice 3D
- Panda 3D
- ZZT ( technically an engine / game maker )
- Xtremeworlds ( technically an engine / mmo maker )
- Stencyl
Libraries
- Pygame
- LWJGL
Other Junk
- Notepad ++
- Sketchup
- Wood Workshop
- Gentex
- Audacity
- WAMP
Unreal Engine 4 for the engine, Unreal Marketplace for the assets and Mixamo for the characters (I had to really heavily tweak them to get to my vision though :().
If you need a good resources for game development. Maybe you can try to view this list on my site. https://mobilegamegraphics.com/tools/ I compiled all the list of sites that might be a need for game developments.