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Magic Tools for Game Development

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by

John Walker
in

A list of game development resources to make magic happen. Created by awesome people for awesome people. This awesome collection is also available on Game-Development.ZEEF.com

Graphics

Great graphics placeholders and tools to turn that squared game into a picasso painting

Assets/Placeholders
  • 2D Cartoon Mobile Game UI Pack – cartoon user interface asset pack. It comes as a layered psd file.
  • 420 Pixel Art Icons for RPGs – Set of 420 RPG icons, free for commercial use.
  • CGTextures – A large collection of textures.
  • GameDev Market – a community-driven marketplace that connects indie game developers with talented asset creators.
  • Games-Icons Set – free icons for your games.
  • Gunpoint-3D – specialized resource dedicated to armored military weapons, the modern and used in world wars.
  • Iconmonstr – Another free icons resource for your games.
  • OpenClipart – Collection of free cliparts.
  • OpenGameArt – a media repository intended for use with free software game projects.
  • Openstock Project – Modern 2D vector style game assets for indie developers, students, hobbyists & professionals – free personal & commercial licences.
  • PlainTextures
  • Reiner’s Tilesets – A blog with free 2D and 3D graphics.
  • Sketchfab – Publish & embed interactive 3D models.
  • SpriteLib – a collection of static and animated graphic objects (also commonly known as sprites).
  • TextureKing
  • Tree Generator – An Online tree generator.
  • Upando – Marketplace with lots of resources for game developers.
  • Vecteezy – Free Vector Art.
  • Yobi3D – Free 3D model search engine.
Spritesheet Tools
  • Aseprite – animated sprite editor & pixel art tool.
  • GraphicsGale – Animation graphic editor easy to use.
  • PiskelApp – Free Online Pixel Art and Animated Sprite Tool.
  • PyxelEdit – Pixel art editor designed to make it fun and easy to make tilesets, levels and animations.
  • ShoeBox – ShoeBox is a free Adobe Air based app for Windows and Mac OSX with game and ui related tools. Each tool uses a drag and drop – or clipbord interaction for a quick workflow.
  • Spritesheet Preview – A simple and free tool to preview sprite sheets
  • TexturePacker – Great spritesheet creation editor.
Bitmap Compression
  • ImageAlpha — Mac OS X GUI for pngquant and other tools
  • Kraken.io – robust, ultra-fast image optimizer and compressor with best-in-class algorithms.
  • PNGGauntlet – Smash PNGs for faster sites
  • PNGoo – Windows GUI for batch conversion.
  • Pngyu – simple PNG image file compression tool.
  • SuperPNG Photoshop plug-in — Mac and Windows. Comparison with "Save for Web"
  • TinyPNG – Advanced lossy compression for PNG images that preserves full alpha transparency.
Texture Tools
  • FilterForge – A plugin for Adobe Photoshop that allows you to build your own filters.
  • PixPlant – PixPlant is a smart 3D texturing tool that creates high quality normal, displacement, specular maps and seamless textures from photos.
  • STG – a tool for creating professional seamlessly-tileable textures from photographs quickly and easily.
Character Generators
Tile/Level Editors
  • ArrayPainter – Array Painter is the easiest and fastest way to make 2D arrays ready for copy pasting into your own program.
  • AutoTileGen – AutoTileGen is an automatic tileset generator for 2D game terrains.
  • OGMO Editor – generic level editor.
  • Mappy – Free tilemap editor.
  • Tiled – free, easy to use and flexible tile map editor.
Animation
  • Fusion Character Animator – small tool for Clickteam Fusion 2.5 to facilitate the animation of 2D character sprites for developers.
  • Spine – Spine is dedicated to 2D animation, providing an efficient workflow both for creating amazing animation and for integrating it into your games.
  • Spriter – Modern tool for sprite animation.
Vector/Image Editor
  • Gimp – GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
  • Inkscape – An open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X.
  • Krita – Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end-to-end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters.
  • Ormr – Ormr is a fast, light-weight, cross-platform procedural graphics editor.
  • Paint.NET – Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows.
  • Pickle – Another Pixel art Editor.
  • Pixelmator – Full-featured image editing app for the Mac
  • Pixen – OpenSource Pixel Art Editor for OSX
Modeling
Terrain Generators
Voxel Editors

Code

Set of game frameworks, engines and platforms

Engines and Frameworks
2D
  • Agen – Cross-Platform framework for making 2D games with Lua, compatible iOS, Mac and Windows devices.
  • Allegro – Allegro 4 & 5 are cross-platform, open source, game programming libraries, primarily for C and C++ developers.
  • AndEngine – 2D Android Game Engine
  • Bacon2D – A framework to ease 2D game development, providing ready-to-use QML elements representing basic game entities needed by most of games.
  • Box2D – A 2D Physics Engine for Games.
  • Chipmunk C# – C# implementation of the Chipmunk2D lib.
  • Chipmunk2D – A fast and lightweight 2D game physics library.
  • Cocos2D – graphic library for games and multimedia, for python language
  • Cocos2d-x – a C++ OpenGL 2D and 3D game engine. Uses C++ but has JS and Lua bindings. Target all the major mobile platforms and operating systems. Additional tools CocoStudio and Cocos Code IDE.
  • Construct 2 – an HTML5 game maker, meaning you are not actually writing JavaScript. Instead, you use actions, events and conditions to do the heavy lifting.
  • Corona SDK – A Cross-Platform Mobile App Development for iOS and Android.
  • CutJS – Lightweight, fast, interactable 2D HTML5 rendering engine for cross-platform game development.
  • Duality – C# / OpenGL 2D Game Engine that comes with visual editor.
  • Ejecta – A Fast, Open Source JavaScript, Canvas & Audio Implementation for iOS.
  • EnchantJS – A simple JavaScript framework for creating games and apps.
  • ENGi – A multi-platform 2D game library for Go.
  • Farseer – a collision detection system with realistic physics responses.
  • FlashPunk – free ActionScript 3 library designed for developing 2D Flash games.
  • Flixel – an open source game-making written in ActionScript3.
  • GameMaker – GameMaker accommodates the creation of cross-platform video games using drag and drop or a scripting language known as Game Maker Language, which can be used to develop more advanced games that could not be created just by using the drag and drop features.
  • GameSalad – Game Creation Engine for Mac and Windows.
  • Gideros – A Cross-Platform framework to create Mobile Apps and games for iOS, Android using Lua programming language.
  • HaxeFlixel – Create cross-platform games easier and free.
  • ImpactJS – Impact is a JavaScript Game Engine that allows you to develop stunning HTML5 Games for desktop and mobile browsers.
  • Jitter – a fast and lightweight physics engine written in C#.
  • KiwiJS – a fun and friendly Open Source HTML5 Game Engine. Some people call it the WordPress of HTML5 game engines
  • LibGDX – Powerful (totally free) library for Java, code once and run the game on desktop, Android, Web, and iOS.
  • LimeJS – HTML5 game framework for building fast, native-experience games for all modern touchscreens and
  • Loom SDK – 2D mobile app and game framework with live reload of code and assets, AS3/JS/C#-like scripting language, and powerful 2D rendering and UI framework. Open source with paid "Turbo" service.
  • Lycheejs – JavaScript Game library that offers a complete solution for prototyping and deployment of HTML5 Canvas, WebGL or native OpenGL(ES) based games inside the Web Browser or native environments.
  • LÖVE – Lua 2D Game Engine.
  • MINX – Open Source 2D game framework written in C++ (to the style of XNA)
  • MOAI – Cross-Platform framework designed for pro game developers to create iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, Chrome and OSX games using C++, OpenGL and Lua scripting.
  • MelonJS – open source light-weight HTML5 game engine.
  • Monkey X – Multi-platform programming language and cross-compiler, aimed at fast game programming.
  • Monogame – Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework.
  • NodeBox – a family of Python tools to create generative design.
  • PandaJS – Open Source HTML5 Engine.
  • Phaser – free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering.
  • PixiJS – is a newcomer HTML5 game renderer – first released in early 2013. A main appeal of the engine is its use of WebGL for faster performance. If WebGL isn’t supported, the engine falls back to standard canvas.
  • Processing – Processing is a programming language, development environment for artists, designers, researchers.
  • PyGame – a 2D game engine in Python.
  • Rpgboss – A 2d rpg game engine and editor based on scala and libgdx. Ease of use, with no programming knowledge.
  • RPGMaker – series of programs for the development of role-playing games.
  • SDL – SDL is a cross-platform library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D.
  • SFML – Simple and Fast Multimedia Library.
  • SpriteKit – iOS/Mac 2D Game Engine.
  • Starling – The GPU powered 2D Flash API
  • Stencyl – a game creation platform that allows users to create 2D video games for computers, mobile devices, and the web.
  • XNA – Microsoft’s game development framework.
  • p2.js – JavaScript 2D physics library
3D
  • Blitz3D 3D basic-like programming language for fast 3D desktop games.
  • Bullet – Real-time physics simulation.
  • Cinder – Cinder is a community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++.
  • Dash – A free and open 3D game engine written in D.
  • Godot – Open source game engine with rich API.
  • Havok Vision – a cross-platform game engine that provides a powerful and versatile multi-platform runtime technology.
  • Haxor – Combine the power of HaXe language and HTML5+WebGL to easily develop powerful applications that can run in any modern browser.
  • Hive3D – Real Time Collaboration 3D engine.
  • Horde3D – small open source 3D rendering engine.
  • Irrlicht – open source high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++.
  • JPCT – jPCT is a 3D engine for desktop Java and Google’s Android.
  • ODE – ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics.
  • Ogre3D – is a scene-oriented, real-time, flexible 3D rendering engine (as opposed to a game engine) written in C++.
  • Panda3D – a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs.
  • PlayCanvas – A WebGL Game Engine.
  • Polycode – Open-Source Framework for creating games in C++ (with Lua bindings).
  • Spring – A powerful free cross-platform RTS engine.
  • Three.js – Javascript 3D Library.
  • Turbulenz – Turbulenz offers the ability to build, publish, iterate and monetise high-quality games that react like no others, with immersive 3D effects and real-time physics that open up a whole new world of unprecedented and extraordinary web content.
  • UDK – the game engine technology developed by Epic Games.
  • Unity 3D – A development engine for the creation of 2D and 3D games and interactive content.
  • Urho3D – Cross-platform rendering and game engine.
  • Wave – Cross-platform engine written in C#
  • jMonkeyEngine 3 – a 3D open-source game engine for adventurous Java developers.
  • voxel.js – voxel.js is a collection of projects that make it easier than ever to create 3D voxel games like Minecraft all in the browser.

Audio

Audio editors, sounds collections and more.

Collections
  • Freesound – collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds.
  • Musopen – Royalty free music.
  • Octave – free library of UI sounds.
  • PacDV – royalty free sounds collection.
Music and Audio Editors
  • Audacity – open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.
  • Audiosauna – transforms your web browser into a fast and flexible music production studio with built in synthesizers and live effects.
  • Audiotool – Online music producer.
  • Bfxr – A tool to make make sound effects for computer games.
  • FamiTracker – free windows tracker for producing music for the NES/Famicom-systems.
  • MadTracker – a powerful and efficient approach to making music. Versatility and compatibility are guaranteed due to full VST™, ASIO™ and ReWire™ support.
  • MilkyTracker – open source, multi-platform music application for creating .MOD and .XM module files.
  • Soundation – Online Professional music studio.
  • iNudge – Create sound patterns online.
  • jfxr – A JavaScript port of the Bfxr sound effect generator.
  • musagi – open source, fairly large and sophisticated music editor and synthesizer

Board Games

Tools for making board games

  • Boardgamizer – Board Game Design Idea Generator.
  • RPTools – a brand of open-source programs designed to enhance traditional pen-and-paper role playing games.

Must see

Blogs, portals, magazines and more

Blogs and Portals
Books
Magazines
Game Jams
  • CompoHub – A compilation site of many game jams in a timeline.
Complete Game Sources

Lessons

Online courses, tutorials, screencasts

General Game Development
Computer Graphics

Other Awesome Lists

Other amazingly awesome lists can be found in the awesome-awesomeness list.

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