The TOP FREE Software for Game Development (2022)

there's a million in one tools out there to make indie games and almost all of them want to take your money why are you running that's because most people dreaming of making indie games think that in order to make a game you have to be like the big boy studios that pay an app load of cash for maya unity pro pro tools blah blah blah these tech companies take advantage of your ignorance and the only way for you to not be ignorant is to listen to me and subscribe i'm your best friend right now i actually make indie games full-time i've made hundreds and thousands of dollars from my indie games and most of the tools i used were free the ones that weren't well we're gonna talk about those and the free alternatives okay so first let's talk about my favorite free tool and that is my free 2d game kit below it's totally free i use this same game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in just 14 days and i want to give it to you for free in high school my friends used to call me the most generous boy i've always been a generous boy getting nominated as the most generous boy ensured that i had a lot of friends and so that's what i want from you i just want you to be my friend download it below totally free all right let's jump into tools that aren't made by me specifically 2d art tools for both pixel art and more illustrative art now a lot

of gatekeeping game devs will tell you to use vector art tools like adobe illustrator vector art basically means you can scale a sprite let's say a character enemy you can scale it into infinity if i wanted to print a mario balloon for let's say a toddler bacteria's birthday i could do it with vector but of course we're not doing that are we we're not printing anything we're making games and games are on screens and screens are made out of pixels but thomas is just too lazy to understand vector art for the record my degree was related to all things print that is vector art also i started making games with adobe flash which was vector art and after years of using vector art i've officially abandoned it for rastar that is art made with actual pixels and not equations sure it's not scalable but as long as you illustrate something in 4k that's 3840x21 pixels you're generally fine okay so what are some raster art tools that are free well adobe photoshop is free but only for a seven day trial i have a feeling the adobe ceo was not the most generous boy in high school now i'll be honest i pay the adobe ceo more than my lunch money

every month that's because i really love photoshop despite the fact that it crashes every time i try and resize anything what is going on photoshop really is an amazing piece of software especially because it talks to unity effectively what i mean is i can simply save a psd that's a photoshop document and unity will instantly know what to do with it i can just go back and forth between unity and photoshop making changes even better if you save a photoshop file as a psb that's a photoshop big document unity it's gonna break down each layer into separate sprites i mean that's a huge win and it saves a ton of time when i was a young whippersnapper i had to export each layer as a png and that brings me to or the gnu image manipulation program this is hands down considered the best photoshop alternative and it's free and open source the software is maintained and updated with a large group of volunteers across the world whereas photoshop is updated with paid top tier talent who all live in san jose california and pay four thousand dollars for a small apartment despite this it's

kind of crazy how similar it is to photoshop gimp's core tools and features are basically the same it's layering system is basically the same and a similar set of effects and filters like hue saturation and lightness blur curves they're all there but how exactly does stack up to photoshop specifically in its relationship to unity i mean that's really what matters how is it as a game dev tool well for starters doesn't support smart objects and adjustment layers these features are what you would call non-destructive so in photoshop if you let's say wanted to convert a tree to a smart object you could add a blur effect to it and turn that effect off later if you realized you didn't want blurry trees this is actually a big deal for the first half of never songs development almost all of my art and photoshop were smart objects simply because i knew i wanted to change or reuse the original files later now i eventually rasterized all the art towards the end of the game's development once i was sure i liked how they looked but at the beginning of development it was crucial to kind of feeling out what i wanted my 2d game to look like additionally unity is

practically made for photoshop like i said you can import psds and also psb layers into unity seamlessly just by pressing ctrl s and then alt tab and hopping over into unity not so much sure you can export your xcf document as a psd or a png but that's still an extra step when you're hopping between an art program and unity 100 times a day 100 times a year that's 10 000 exports it adds up and it's really not efficient all that said there are plenty of unity developers out there who swear by trust me they show up in my live streams all the time it's kind of annoying but they love it really is an incredible free alternative and you should definitely check it out if you want to avoid paying the adobe ceo your lunch money last but not least regarding art tools let's not forget about 3d tools there's really no reason to even say it because most of you know it but just use blender i'm still a bit baffled that it's free granted the user interface did used to suck but now with the recent update blender is a top tier 3d software and you can do everything from modeling unwrapping sculpting painting animating so much more and like photoshop importing a proprietary dot

blend file into unity is as easy as well just saving the model in your unity folder that's about it one final note about blender it is harder than learning say something like photoshop and perhaps you already knew that but i just wanted to let you know so that you don't get discouraged it's kind of a lot like learning to drive stick a lot of the hotkeys are muscle memory but once you figure it out you won't be wrecking your 1998 nissan altima again after shifting into first gear now let's talk about development tools unity is better than unreal if you disagree comment below see what i did there that's called getting engagement for the youtube algorithm also smash the like button if you've made it this far that would really mean a lot to me now obviously there's a billion reasons to use and not use unity or unreal overall they're both pretty great and also they're both free well not so fast unreal charges a five percent royalty fee for any game made by unreal that makes over a million bucks so if you make a million bucks with your unreal game steam's gonna take 30 percent leaving 700 grand unreal will take five percent of that which is 35 grand then you basically pay 40 taxes on

the remaining 665 000 which leaves you with 399 000 obviously guys that's a lot of money but when you realize you made a million bucks and now it's 399 000 that is the most depressing thing i've said all year oh and don't forget if you're the most generous boy like me you also give 10 to your local baptist church that leaves just enough money to pay for some groceries and some people still ask me why i'm libertarian so it's basically free if you don't make a great game got it all in all i do recommend unity funny thing about unity is that they say if you make more than a hundred thousand dollars you have to pay for a subscription now there's a loophole here if you do make more than a hundred thousand dollars just don't tell them you did i don't recommend lying here i'm just saying don't tell the truth unity is honestly an incredible tool and it can be used to port to pretty much every platform actually i've ported both of my games to switch xbox playstation 4 apple ios apple tv obviously pc and mac and that was all unity it has an incredible community and the documentation is top notch honestly it's better than unreal

in this regard for example if you have a bug that you can't quite iron out with unity it's always just one google search away so i'm gonna make up a bug right now let's see um computer catches fire when opening unity ah see simple solution right at the top here just use a fire extinguisher but seriously let's say you wanted to search for some line of code to put in your game you can google search it you're likely to find someone's code that they've pasted into the community and you just steal it for example for my recent game about a dog i simply googled patrolling ai agent and i instantly got a script that i could use in my game and just copy and paste that's a solid community right there and it's just gonna get better my favorite part of game dev is sound design especially when i'm recording your mom i started mixing sounds for my games when i was 16 and never once have i deviated from audacity it's kind of funny it still basically looks the same as when i was using it on my gateway windows millennium edition pc back in middle school but it gets the job done and yeah it's totally free compression distortion echo equalizer reverb and a

bazillion more now where exactly do we get sounds that we can mix in audacity well you record them of course i've tried this and it works for hyper-specific sound effects like character voices but for other generic stuff i've actually just used freesound.org everything is free but you should be careful not everything is free for commercial use meaning some sounds can't be used in your game if you're going to make money so for my two commercial titles i used thousands of sound samples spliced them together in audacity with some effects and then i created a website with all the credits listed on that site then in the credits of the game i just listed the website url regarding music this is where owning a mac for once in your entire life might actually be a good idea for just two thousand dollars you can get an aluminum cube that can record music screen not included garageband comes free with any two thousand dollar cube and i'll be honest i'm about to buy myself an aluminum cube for this exact reason garageband is that good i actually bought logic pro which is basically the josh groban to the andy bernard but

garageband is what i used for my first games now i use logic pro if you're using a pc though there's a few alternatives to garageband that actually look honestly like they suck instead of lying to you to tie into the video's title here i'm just going to say it if you want to write great music with free software it's probably not a great idea that said here are a few free alternatives to garageband on pc i'm just gonna recommend waveform free and ableton live lite ableton is probably the one i would choose because ableton is actually super similar to garageband and logic pro and i've been tempted to transition if writing music is not your thing and honestly most of you probably don't want to write your own music there's actually a few websites the links are below that have some free music you can use sure quality music is going to be scarce on these sites but every once in a while i'll find a gem and at the risk of exposing one of my favorite artists here he is his name is e-r-h and he's on freesound.org his music is top-notch you may have to ask him though using the message system on freesound.org because his music is not

necessarily free for commercial use but i will say sometimes he says yes another great site is digg.ccmixter.org the tracks in here are free for commercial use and they're not half bad all in all guys that's really all you need to make games seriously so you really have no excuse not to at least try and also don't forget about my free 2d game kit below again totally free i use this game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in just 14 days and i got to play it with him on his channel which was really awesome link is below you can make a million bucks off this game kit i really don't care you use it with unity pretty awesome all right i'll show them cheers