Resources

List of resources to help get you started in various aspects of game development.

Please double check the information and licensing on everything listed as it may have changed from the time that it was added.

Game Engines

Engine Description Royalty Model
Amazon Lumberyard Fork of the CryEngine which can be used for 2D and 3D games. Supports Lua and C++. No royalties but you must use AWS for online services.
CryEngine Engine for creating beautiful 2D and 3D games, be it VR or non. Recently integrated C# support. 5% royalty applies when you ship your project. Your first $5K annual revenue per project is royalty-free.
Duality Modular 2D game engine that provides its own visual editor. It’s highly extensible, written entirely in C# and backed by OpenGL. Source is on GitHub. Actively looking for contributors. Learn more: Getting Started with Duality. None
Godot Open source engine for creating 2D and 3D games. Supports GDScript, C#, C++ and visual scripting. Completely free and open-source under the very permissive MIT license. No strings attached, no royalties, nothing. Your game is yours, down to the last line of engine code.
MonoGame Free Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework. Supports C#. None
SadConsole A MonoGame 3.7-based game library using .NET Standard 2.0 that provides an engine to emulate old-school console and command prompt style graphics. Source is on GitHub and has an active community on Discord. Learn more here. None
Unity Robust engine for creating 2D and 3D games, be it VR or non. Supports C#. Learn more: Basics of Unity. Free until company makes $100,000/yr then requires seat license subscription for active development. No royalties.
Unreal Engine Engine for creating 2D and 3D games, be it VR or non. Supports C++ and Blueprints (visual scripting). 5% of gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product per calendar quarter

Tools

Name Description
Behavior Tree Visualizer A tool built in Unity that draws a graph representation of behavior trees running in the scene. Useful for viewing and debugging.

3D Modeling, Rigging and Animation

Name Description
Blender A free/open source 3D creation suite. Great for modeling, rigging and animation.
Blender Guru YouTube Channel A series of Blender tutorials.

2D / Concept Art

Name Description
Ctrl+Paint A library of videos teaching both digital painting and general drawing concepts.

Free Assets

Name Description
My Models Various 3D models.
Kenney Game Assets Over 35,000 free images, audio files and 3D models.
AxeyWorks Low Poly Free Pack A collection of free 3D models.
Free Lowpoly Packs Free low-poly assets created by QuaterniusDev.
Reddit List of Free 2D Assets List of Free 2D Assets maintained on Reddit.
Over 2,600 Game Icons Thousands of free icons in SVG or PNG format. Requests can be made on their GitHub.
Radial Progress Bar Shader for Unity Open source / customizable radial progress bar shader for Unity3D. Allows you to set arc range, minimum and maximum colors, textures, radius, and a few more things. Create HP Bars, Speedometers, rank progress, etc. Available on GitHub