So, what is your favourite tool of choice when you make games? What is your favourite engine to craft your interactive experiences? This includes any you may have made yourself.


I quite enjoy Unity because it is simple and versatile. You can essentially make any game of any genre in it. You do need to have a little bit of programming skill to get it to do what you want, but there are a lot of existing scripts around and a support board with some rather helpful people so even if you're not a great programmer you should be able to get by.


How about you?

I've heard good things about Unity, although I always assumed that most Unity users were making 3-D platformers and FPS games. I might give Unity another look now that I know it's more flexible.

I've done most of my game development with Game Maker (GM 7.0 and now 8.0). GM is not without its limitations, and YoYoGames has done some things in recent years that didn't go over well (like making even registered users pay every time there's a new version). Irritations aside, however, GM has served me well through the years, and it remains a very powerful program.

A lot of the GM engines have severe shortcomings that make them difficult to use and edit (the Hello Engine, rich in features but poor in documentation, is a good example). Dazzle's GM tutorial is probably the best-explained one I've seen: Topic #574

Haha, thanks man I'm still writing some of those now and then, will post when finished.

As for my favorite engine: I use Game Maker 8.0 a lot. I've also downloaded Unity, Blender and the Unreal Engine to fool around with, but I'd rather stick with what I'm familiar with, plain ol' Game Maker.

Yeah, I have been a bit sceptical with regards to GM in recent years. I'm not hugely convinced with what they offer in the paid version considering all you can do for free (or close to free) with Unity and UDK. GM seems really good for introducing people to game design, prototypes and small games but doesn't offer much support with regards to selling and distribution. UDK and Unity can distribute to all kinds of platforms and you only really need to pay the licensing fee of the platform (eg: $100 to distribute on iPhone) to do it.

I've been using GM since 2007 and I'm using GM8.0 because 8.1 is not good.

i've been using clickteam products since i first got into game making. that said, i haven't produced anything with it in a long time.

Oh wow, TGF, I remember playing with that about 10 years ago. Haven't heard about it in forever, heck I didn't even know it was still around.

I'm not too interested in game making really, but what I've seen done with PyGame or other Python stuff has been pretty cool, so I'd probably use that as I already know a bit of Python anyway and really enjoy using it.

plus although using proprietary game making tools might make things easier i'd feel a bit weird having my code belong to some platform i don't have any control over

With regards to Unity, as far as I am aware they own all licensing and IP of the engine itself but anything further developed in it belongs to whomever wrote it or the person/company who contracted someone to write it.

I don't know for sure, seeing as I'm not a lawyer and most of this is mumbo-jumbo:
http://unity3d.com/company/legal/eula

Frankly though, any software developer will tell you there's no reason to write something twice. In the long run, leasing something that already works and does what you want will be better than spending money and man-hours on making something that will do the same thing.

They recently added a 2D feature, which makes creating 2D games like platformers way easier to do.

On topic: I've always used GameMaker (currently 8.1) and it quite fits my needs. I wanted to try out Unity, but my graphics card was too low. When I get a new laptop, I'll be sure to try Unity (and if I feel like it's great, then I'll use the newly-added 2D feature to create some stuff with it)