In order to get started becoming a game world engineer, you’re going to need some software. There has never been more tools available to make video games than there is right now. And it’s much easier to make games than ever before. Anyone can learn to make a video game, it is not that hard to learn.
This article will point you to the best free 3D game development software that you can use to get started developing your own games.
Traditional Game Engines
These game engines are the “traditional” kind that use coding languages to implement the game logic.
Unity 3D
Unity 3D is one of the top game engines available for free. It is an object-based game engine that uses C# as its scripting language. The engine runs on PC and Mac and even if you have an older machine it performs well, allowing just about everyone to make games with it.
Unity’s website has a learning platform with a wide variety of free courses and tutorials available to learn it, and it has one of the largest asset stores where you can find pretty much any game asset or system to make it faster for you to make a game. Many commercial games are made with Unity.
Unity is free for commercial use as long as you make less than $100,000 per year from it. Once you go over that amount, you’ll have to buy a license but at that point you’re making enough money to afford the $399 per year or $40 per month, so it basically pays for itself.
You can download the latest version of Unity at [unity3d.com]. I recommend downloading the latest LTS version, which at the time of writing, is Unity 2022.3. LTS stands for “Long term support” and it is the most stable version.
You can download Unity for PC and Mac at unity3d.com.
Unreal Engine 5
Unreal Engine is the grand-daddy of game engines. It’s been around since the 1990s and it has been used to create many triple-A games for PC and consoles. It uses C++ as its scripting language. The game engine will require a more beefy computer in order to develop games for it than other engines, as it has some of the most advanced graphics capabilities than any other game engine.
They have a free learning library with hundreds of courses and tutorials to get you started.
It is free for personal and indie use, and you can ship a commercial game completely free. Once your gross revenue exceeds 1 million US dollars, then they require a 5{4fdcf0011c2b51217a6da6e48f6f23e1acd707e39ad22193cd3dec3e9a37cda7} royalty fee on your sales. They do require you to submit a release form to notify them that your game is being released in order to get this $1 million royalty exemption.
You can find it at unrealengine.com.
Godot Engine
Godot is an open-source game development engine that is gaining popularity among indie developers. It offers a free and fully-featured engine with an intuitive node-based visual scripting system and supports multiple programming languages such as C#, C++, and GDscript, their proprietary scripting language.
Their documentation has step by step examples of how to create 2D and 3D games, and there are plenty of tutorials available on YouTube.
Godot is completely open source (MIT License) and free for commercial use, with no fees ever required, so it may be more attractive to you than Unity or Unreal simply for the fact that you don’t need to worry about buying a license or paying royalties. Under the MIT license you do need to include the license text somewhere in your game (like in the credits).
Download it for PC and Mac at godotengine.org.
No-code Game Development Tools
These tools do not require you to know any coding language, they allow you to make games using a drag and drop environment.
GDevelop
GDevelop is an open-source, no code game development environment that can be used to make 2D and 3D games. They feature an online, in-browser editor, as well as a downloadable application for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is called “The game engine for everybody” due to its ease of use and no code environment. It uses an event-based architecture.
They also have GDevelop Academy, a free learning platform with dozens of tutorials to guide you through making games in GDevelop. They have courses and lessons from beginner to advanced as well as tutorials that teach you to make specific type of games like platformers, tower defense, and zelda, and they have specific tutorials that teach how to make specific game mechanics.
This software is probably the most newbie friendly of all the options for game development. You can find it at gdevelop.io.
Construct 3
Construct 3 is a browser-based, 2D game engine (that has some 3D capabilities) that, like GDevelop, is event-based, and allows you to use no-code visual scripting and you can also add JavaScript code as well.
They have many free courses and tutorials to learn the product.
It has a free trial with limitations, so while it is technically free, you’ll have to sign up for the one of the plans if you want to make more than just the most basic of games with it. If you are planning on making a commercial game, you’ll need to sign up for the Business plan. If you’re not using it to make commercial games, you can sign up for the personal plan. They have location based pricing, so the price of these plans varies depending on what country you are living in. The more developed countries such as USA and Canada will have the highest prices.
You can find it at construct.net.
Stencyl
Stencyl is a no-code 2D game development tool that uses blocks similar to the MIT Scratch programming language, with pre-made blocks that snap together such as If/then, user input, and flow control. A user can write their own blocks using code if they want, but it is not necessary.
It is free for personal use, $99/year to publish to Web and Desktop, and $199/year to add publishing to iOS and Android.
You can download it at stencyl.com.
Adventure Game Studio
Adventure Game Studio allows you to create point-and-click adventure games, similar to the Sierra adventure games like King’s Quest from the 1990s. The game development is an environment using a project tree and inspector and uses a C#-like scripting language for game logic, similar to Unity.
AGS is completely free and open source. Download it for Windows at adventuregamestudio.co.uk.
Blender
Blender is not a game engine, but it is used to create game content such as 3D models and animations for your game. You can also use it to rig a character for animation in your game engine. Eventually you are going to want to use Blender to create assets for your game, whatever the game engine you choose to use.
It is completely free, and can be downloaded at blender.org.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a ton of options to get started making your own games. Where should you start? My recommendation is, if you don’t mind learning a bit of code, Unity 3D is the best choice, it has wide support with the amount of tutorials and courses available, it is used by many professional game studios, and it has a large asset store where you can download ready-made assets to use to make your own games. And C# is easier to learn than Unreal’s C++.
But if you really don’t want to deal with coding, I would give GDevelop a try, because it is free.
Whichever platform you choose, you’re well on the way to becoming a game world engineer yourself.