Game Development

A game engine is a software-development environment designed for people to build video games. Developers use game engines to construct games for consoles, mobile devices, and personal computers. The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, scene graph, and may include video support for cinematics. Implementers often economize on the process of game development by reusing/adapting, in large part, the same game engine to produce different games^[1] or to aid in porting games to multiple platforms.

Free Game Development Engines

Unity
Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Inc.’s Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X-exclusive game engine. As of 2018, the engine had been extended to support more than 25 platforms.

Game Maker Studio
GameMaker Studio is a cross-platform game engine developed by YoYo Games. GameMaker accommodates the creation of cross-platform and multi-genre video games using a custom drag-and-drop visual programming

Amazon Lumberyard
We believe game developers deserve another choice. That’s why we’re building Lumberyard: a game engine with no royalties or seat fees, frictionless integration with Twitch and AWS, plus much more on the horizon.

Builder Box
With Buildbox, creating games is simple. There is no programming or scripting needed. Use one of our many assets to get started and preview your game in real time. Buildbox is the fastest development tool ever created. Hit games like Color Switch and The Line Zen were made in a a single week using Buildbox…

Armory Engine
Armory is an open-source 3D engine focused on portability, minimal footprint and performance. The renderer is fully scriptable with deferred and forward paths supported out of the box.

Written in C, Haxe & WebAssembly, structured as a data-driven engine.