Gone are the days when game developement was only limited to big software companies like Ubisoft, THQ, Capcom, and Konami among others.
Fairly affordable game engines such has Unity, the release of Epic's UnrealEngine and Crytek CryEngine to the public for free have somewhat level the playing field since anyone can now lay his hand on these software to make his dream of becoming a professional game developer a reality.
These are not the only game engine available for game development and often I've seen people on different blogs either complaining that CryEngine is too complex for a beginner or making 2D games is not easy in UnrealEngine.
So I decided to make a small list of other awesome 2D/3D game engines
- Cocos2d-x
Cocos2d-x is an open source cross-platform game development tool that can be use to develop games for platforms such as iOS, Android, HTML5, Windows phone and windows.
The engine was used to create games like, Castle clash
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And Heroes Charge
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ShiVa is a 3D game and application development suite that comes with an easy to use, very powerful WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.
ShiVa can export games and applications to many target platforms, including Mobile like iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, Desktops like Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Web browsers supporting Flash, HTML5 and our custom plugin, as well as Game Consoles like the Xbox 360, PlayStation3 and Nintendo Wii.
Shiva is not free, it has a price tag of $200 for a Basic license and a price of $1000 for Advance license
Ogre is an open-source graphics rendering engines, and has been used in a large number of production projects, in such diverse areas as games, simulators, educational software, interactive art, scientific visualisation.
It is also a cross-platform engine that can deploy applictions to Linux, OSX, Android, iOS andWindows Phone. An example of game made with Ogre is
Torchlight
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Godot is another completely free and open source 2D/3D multi-platform game development tool. Godot has a no strings attached, no royalties license in which any game you create with the engine is completely yours. The engine was US d to create games such as Towns of the dead, Ghost driver, Numbers Fusion and Curse of the Demon Sword among other games.
Curse of the demon sword
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The Atomic Game Engine is a multi-platform 2D and 3D engine with a consistent API in C++, C#, JavaScript, and TypeScript .
It support drag and drop standard 2D/3D format import, including Autodesk FBX, Collada, Blender, Spriter, Tiled and games can be deployed to Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and WebGL.
I hope someone is able to benefit from this post
As for me, UE and Unity are way ahead of other free engines
Dont see any point in using these
I use UE4 myself...that was actually b4 my laptop got spoilt. I only put out the list so that people can know that there are other tools available to them. As an example I have friends that are only interested in 2D game development and are really not ready yet to deal with Engines such as UE or CryEngine. So Cocos2d-x would be perfect for such individuals.
Im not really familliar with unity, but i thought it has a really powerful 2D/2.5D editor
Unity do have a very powerful 2D editor,with some nice tutorials on it.