Anthology Of Game Creation Tools

[Ulaered]

Hello everyone,

I was hoping we could get a short thread about the different game creation software out there, and their pros and cons.

Name :
Game style : Visual novel, text + images , 2D RPG, 3D RPG
Programming skill level requirement : 1= no programming needed , 10 = unity level , >9000 using basic C or assembly
Ease of cheat : (this is optional)
Pros:

• Things they do well

Cons

• This they do poorly

General biased opinion:

Experience level : amount of experience the commenter have with this software


Multiple reviews of the same engine are welcome. Try to reply the first review of the engine to link similar engines together.

 

[Ulaered]

Name : Twine (sugarcube)
Game style : text + images
Programming skill level requirement : level 2 , some programming knowledge doesn't hurt to get started
Ease of cheat : very easy. Variables can be directly edited from the browser console
Pros:

• Very easy to get started

Cons

• The Twine IDE sucks for a larger project.

• IDE does not have undo

General biased opinion: In my opinion, this is the easiest place to start learning about programming and creating simple games. Get the ball rolling for proof of concept games

Experience level : I dabble a little just for fun. No real experience

 

[Archast]

Name : Unity
Game style : Anything (really)
Programming skill level requirement : 9

Pros:

• Can export to any platform
• Community support
• Freedom to do what you want
• Stable and optimized
• Lot of assets to speed up the game-dev time.

Cons

• Price
  
• Steep learning curve
• You need to know some programming at least
• More work to do some things

General biased opinion:Unity is freedom impersonated, do what you want to do anyway you want to do, with a lot of assets you sometimes don't even need to program a thing, make a simple game, follow the tutorials they provide so easily, and you will see that this beast is tamable .

Experience level : I've done a 2D game before (for my master's degree), and I'm actually making another 2d game, so I'm pretty experienced with it (2D).

 

[Ulaered]

Name : Ren'Py
Game style : Visual novel
Programming skill level requirement : 2
Programming Language : Python
Supported Platforms : Windows (x32 and x64), Mac, Linux
Ease of cheat : Very easy. No programming skills required to enable debug console
Pros:

• Very easy to get started
• Great for all project sizes
• Very fast prototyping
  
• Free

Cons :

• Tutorials are good to get started but advanced customization requires good python knowledge
  • Documentation can be hard to navigate (compared to JavaDocs)
• No dedicated IDE

General biased opinion : In general, I think this is a great platform for all project sizes. It allows the creator lots of freedom to implement their ideas.

Experience level : I dabble a little just for fun. No real experience

URL :

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[sceryx]

Name : Godot
Game style : Pretty much anything
Programming skill level requirement : 7-9
Pros:

• MIT LICENSE
• Can export to multiple platforms
• Fully free (no levels to pay to get extra benefits)
• Freedom to do what you want
• Very light program
• Lots of tutorials
• Devs are pretty quick to respond on their repository

Cons

• Asset library is small
• Sometimes you have to build basic tools
• High learning curve if you don't have programming experience
• If you want to build big projects, you have to know some programming concepts (OOP, singletons, etc.)

General biased opinion:
Godot, like Unity, offers you a lot of freedom on what you can make. However, this freedom comes at the cost of needing to have programming skills and as the asset library is quite small you'll end up programming almost everything yourself. I do like that you can import C++ directly but it has its own scripting language GDScript that is very easy to pick up (a mix of javascript/python/c++). I also like that they have their entire repository on Github so there are many user features that are added and that can be imported into your Godot version.

Experience level : I have about 3 months experience (working on a Girls Life/Life Sim clone for fun) but 2 years with Unity (2D and 3D) and that experience transferred right over.

I would welcome anyone who is more experienced with Godot to add/change anything!

URL:

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[CeLezte]

Name: Twine 2 / SugarCube 2.20 Story Template (without any JS/CSS)
Game Style:

• Text Adventure Games with web UI,
• Life Simulators with web UI.
• Misc.: Basically any game that can make use of separate rooms orwhere you travel from room to room.

Programming Skill Required: 1-2 (new to programming-beginner)
Programming Language: SugarCube Script and Twee
Ease of Cheat: Fairly easy. Open game in browser, type: SugarCube.state.variables to access all game variables and modify them using your browser's JS console.
Pro:

• Easy to program using its own script language
• Ideal for any beginner to programming / scripting
• Very useful for quick prototyping
• Quick storyboarding
• Very useful QA section on Twine's website
• SugarCube's dev. answers all questions you may have about scripting in SugarCube

Con:

• Vanilla Twine and Sugarcube can get you far but don't expect to create anything really complex (such as a quality PC indie game, console game or mobile game) using the default editor and scripting language.
• Twine 2 editor lacks many features that would provide a bit of quality of life (such as undo and redo) and after a project has reached a certain complexity, managing rooms will become a mess.
• Creating custom UI is not straith forward, you'll find many people asking in the Twine QA question regarding custom UIs.
• Creating custom game play such as real time actions, QTs etc. is not easy if not inpossible without proper knowledge of JavaScript and having a comprehensive knowlege of how SugarCube works.
• Porting CSS or other custom style sheet code might become a challange without proper knowledge of how SugarCube handles things (rendering rooms)
• Twine doesn't have a resource processing pipeline. You will run into issues setting up any resources that are outside of Twine, such as external JS, CSS and image / web video files.

 

[CeLezte]

Experience level: Started learning this, JS and CSS back in January of 2017. I have around a year of experience with Twine and SugarCube. The learning curve was rather steep for the things that I wanted to use Twine. I learned about many of the flaws and bugs that were in SugarCube and reported them right away. I mostly dabbled with how to questions on the forums and later on started working on mini games in which I incorporated parts of the game logic that I wanted to see in my upcoming game. I learned alot about JS/CSS and SugarCube. My first game is now 6-7 months in development and it's going fine so far. Getting used to writing small test cases and debugging through the console took me a while, since I'm more of a "debugger user" type of developer. It also kind of bothered me that resources couldn't be managed inside Twine's editor, so I wrote my own scripts in Python to handle separate images (clean duplicates, only use pictures that are referenced in code, generate absolute path to JavaScript and CSS, etc.). I'm also using Visual Studio Code with a SugarCube lexer to edit my code, since Twine doesn't have an undo button and this has cost me a lot when I was unaware of it.

If my project takes off, I'll think of moving over to Tweego (A GOlang implementation of Twine, that compiles JS and TW files into HTML) with NodeJS (to produce executables that can handle files) and write my own editor for my game. I just can't stand the limitations and lack of meaningful updates that come out for Twine.

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