Easiest Game Engines

hello ladies and gentlemen it's mike here at game for scratch and today we are going to answer a simple question what are the easiest game engines now that's actually going to vary from person to person but the reason why we are talking about this is because of buildbox now if you've never heard of buildbox it is a 3d super easy to use game engine it kind of filled a unique niche there but there are other options out there the reason why we're looking for alternatives is because build bucks just blew themselves up with some idiotic price changes i'm not going to rehash all that i'm just going to tell you we already covered i will link that in the linked article down below if you want to learn more about buildbox going all weapons great stupid you can if you want to stay up to date on the latest in game development news do hit that subscribe button but after buildbox went insane it did kind of leave a hole in the market what buildbox was good for is they were a very approachable easy to use 3d game engine and that's what we were going to run through today some of my suggestions for easy or entry-level game engines these are some of the easiest to use options you're going to find some are going to be 2d some are going to be 3d and some are going to be games that you can script in and there are a ton of other options i've covered many on the channel but these are some of the ones that jump out to me so if you're in the market for an easy game engine stay tuned now the first one we're going to start with is scratch now scratch was invented by mit and this is like the og teaching game engine there's some really nice things about scratch it comes with a lot of content and it kind of invented the whole uh build these shapes together uh to build your game logic but the nice thing is it has all of these tools built in nice interactivity but as you can tell by it it's also very much aimed at kids now if you're looking to make something more advanced than simple 2d games you're gonna quickly want to move beyond scratch but if you're trying to get someone started especially a younger child started but to be honest even an adult can have fun playing with scratch scratch is probably as easy as it gets the nice thing with scratch is they are um open source and completely free next up we have construct now i'm gonna mention construct early because they just trolled the heck out of buildbox if you are a build box user uh you can submit to construct and get six months free and construct is a visual on-screen based game engine it's mostly 2d they are starting to implement some 3d functionality but your programming is like almost like spreadsheets if i'm going to describe it nicely now there are some disadvantages to construct at least to some people uh they move to a browser-based approach for the tooling i know that turns some people off you can work entirely offline but if your anti-browser software construct is not going to be for you and also it is ultimately commercial software that's not you know neither here nor there but it's one of those things to be aware of now if that commercial price tag does turn you off there's also g develop g develop and construct are quite similar to each other they're very similar in what they do they're both 2d game engines i don't know if construct has sorry if g develop has moved into 3d i think it's one of those things they've talked about but i don't think that functionality is there it uses a very similar spreadsheet flowchart kind of approach to developing games and it has all of the tooling you need in one place i've done a couple of videos on gdevelop in the past if you want to learn a little bit more about it but this is a free option which is always kind of nice now next up we move on to click team fusion and this is again all three of those engines use kind of a similar approach to how things work this kind of spreadsheet type grid now one of the things about click team fusion is it's been a long time since it was updated there is a free free version of click team fusion a commercial version of click team fusion you pay for supporting various different other platforms basically so if you want to run mobile or web you got to pay and i think the free version has some limitations in it but you can check it out for free the biggest claim to fame from this engine is it was what was used to create the uh five nights at freddy's series and a few other actually pretty popular things now they've been working on click team fusion 3 forever and that one is going to have um uh full-blown 3d support i believe but i don't know when that is ever going to come out so who knows at this point in time next up we have uh microsoft's arcade uh make our what no uh sorry make code arcade and i just did a tutorial on this one i love this game engine it is just it's an interesting experience to work with now this is entirely browser-based one of those things to be aware of it's an open source project and it's completely free and you can also use it to run on other hardwares it's kind of taken the stencil oops i forgot i had audio all right i'm going to turn that off uh you you build things together this was all the code required to create a survivor horror or pac-man game i've done a tutorial on that if you do want to check out make code arcade you can also actually have it run on a variety of different devices that are out there some of these devices are designed that you kind of build them yourself it is definitely an interesting project and it's a heck of a lot of fun to play with and then the cool thing here is you can also switch to code so if you're working with visual it can have it as a code generator that works in javascript or even python this is one of my greatest recommendations for beginners and if you're just a programmer in general want to go and have some fun with this definitely worth checking out next up we have stencil now stencil is free for desktop usage this one is another nice engine in the fact that you can actually extend it using the hacks programming language um it uses a lego brick kind of setup as well i have done a hands-on with this one unfortunately i believe stencil is 100 2d only which is of course going to be a bit of a problem uh next up we get into core now core is interesting in that this is kind of a game for building games that's a little bit closer to the engine side of things than something like say uh oh what was my brain going with uh the one that just had a really big ipo uh roblox or minecraft this is more of a game you you actually can use their predefined bricks and blocks and tools and and all this other stuff to do your game design but you can also go one step further create things with lua and then there is a community of interconnected games that you can work with this is actually built on top of unreal engine and is a project with a lot of momentum behind it and now another approach on those same lines is manu video make game maker now this is more aimed at like artists your workflow is more along the lines of traditional animation based approaches you're limited in what you can do but that also makes it quite easy to work with so this one is probably would be most useful to say an artist looking to show off their their capabilities because an artist is easily going to understand the trigger and event based driven coding method whereas a programmer is going to find what is currently there is incredibly limiting and there's no way to extend it but manual is definitely one to keep an eye on i've covered it a couple times in the past as well uh and then i have done codeless visual scripting game engine summary as well we're gonna see a lot of the things that we just looked at you're gonna notice a lot of the ones we just talked about actually have um these options in place and there's also a number of engines i didn't mention uh mostly on the commercial side that are good and viable options out there there's copper cube go ahead check that one out there's game guru app game kit studio so there are some other ones beyond what i've talked about here those are all slightly more difficult than what i dealt with here so far you're gonna almost always have to get into a certain amount of programming experience to work with those but all three of those are also pretty entry level and i have covered every single one of them on the channel in past if you want to learn more but like i said i did a resource back in 2019 of the codeless visual scripting engines that are out there things like armory 3d which actually works in uh side of blender using this visual approach but truth of the matter is not really beginner friendly and frankly it's been somewhat abandoned now you'll notice buildbox had a place on this list it had a lot of potential in this space but no cryengine has visual programming but that is not beginner friendly copper cube has a visual programming and i actually would recommend that and i did a tutorial on that it'll be linked here so if you want to come in here i will link this as well so if you're looking for a codeless game engine not necessarily easier by the way but uh there are other options out there the nice thing about a codeless approach is a lot of times it's sort of self-documenting so you can do more of a trial and error based approach coppercube though is a good suggestion and coppercube6 is free now so that's definitely a nice thing uh they're doing in game engine has a visual scripting language it's not very good if i'm honest it doesn't really make your life any easier it's basically a one-to-one mapping with their gd script that's built in but in time they are adding more features and functionality to it that hopefully it will be a better experience in time we have unity we have unreal engine and then again uh 2d a lot of the ones we cover click team fusion construct 3 stencil scratch g develop game maker studio has a visual programming or drag and drop they call it uh programming language another option out there is game salad focused at students and non-programmers uh there's pixel game maker mv which is pretty much terrible on top of that there's also like rpg game maker rpg in a box and all these other kind of uh game engines that are aimed at making a very specific style of game and it really comes down to those ones if you are interested in that genre those engines could be a good pick up for you so those are some of the the visual programming languages out there there are of course more this isn't a comprehensive list by any means whatsoever another thing that i had done in the past this is way back in 2016. i should do an updated version of this but this was more specifically aimed at getting a child involved in the world of game development i will link this down below if you want to go through this resource as well uh we actually cover a lot of the same game edges but we're going to cover a couple of things here as well because a lot of it's going to come down to the age of the person you are working with the attention span of the person you're working with because for example if you're looking with a six eight maybe even ten year old they probably don't think in terms of scripting level language they're probably better off with something a visual in approach uh but there are some more entry-level coding type things so again we got g develop here as an option uh there's the lua programming language which has some great options out there using lua such as uh the love framework uh there's the default game engine which is completely free not really specifically beginner friendly but it is pretty easy to work with but this kind of runs down some of the terminology you may need to understand to make this decision especially if you are coming at trying to get your kids started in game development but you yourself don't really have an interest in game development this guide should help you out but again here we got suggestions such as scratch uh we've got construct again kind of you're gonna see a consistency here because they are good fits game maker is another option although that one is commercial they were purchased by opera the browser maker and i wouldn't be surprised to see some pricing changes there so hopefully that comes in time alua and love are a good combination if you want a script there's a framework for python called pi game the cool thing there and that's pure coding by the way but it is a nice approachable method of making games if you want to start someone out pie game is pretty slow uh but there's a lot of books out there that will get you started coding so if you're if you or your kid or someone you know they want to get into programming and they want to do it via games this is an option out there um and then uh you know you got stencil and a few other lego mindstorm is another interesting option there we got roblox and minecraft and so on so i've got this guide listed as well it is a few day a few years old uh but quite frankly it's as you saw from a number of the suggestions we had in this one a lot of it is still up to date so quick recap you've got things like scratch construct g develop click team fusion uh microsoft make code arcade stencil core manu and then a number of visual things out there now another one that people are going to tell you is the possibility of using unity and both and that's a good combination bolt is a nice programming language that's built on top of uni gives you a visual approach um it has now been purchased by unity is included out of the box and it's gonna kind of become a premier feature with that in time unity will become a much better beast for introductory level game development and there's a huge community behind unity i just got to warn you there is a lot of features and functionality in unity it is ultimately a professional tool so there's gonna be you're gonna have to stay focused there's a lot there that could distract you but there are you could perfectly validly start with something like unity and using bolt as your visual programming language and unreal engines blueprints in all honesty unreal engine blueprints are the single best visual programming language i have ever experienced as an actual programmer so it feels the most like programming to me i don't mind working in it at all but it's also hugely complex so i actually don't really recommend it to an absolute beginner but it is another option out there there are a decent number of books and resources if you want to learn with unity or unreal engine those are two viable options as well but the other ones i listed are definitely beginner tier level and again a couple of honorable mentions go out to things like copper cube app game kit game guru a lot of these are available on steam they're often discounted and again copper cube 6 is now actually free and i did a tutorial on it if you want to check that out everything you need to know is probably in that tutorial so it would give you an idea if this engine does what you want now a lot of these are not going to have all of the features in functionality in like a triple a style game development environment but you want that you are a beginner whenever they take away all these options from you they also generally streamline the decisions you need to make so that's a good trade-off most of the time but that is a number of things to get you started are you do you have another suggestion on top of that and by the way if you are looking for like just game engines in general i've covered well over a hundred of them in a playlist i will link that down below as well so that is it let me know what you think easiest game engine give me your comments down below and i'll talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 29,571

Keywords: Arcade, Beginner, Bolt, Construct, Core, Easy, GDevelop, Game Development, Game Engine, GameDev, Godot, Guide, MakeCode, Manu, Scratch, Stencyl, Tutorial, Unity, Unreal

Id: 5ItITDs967M

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021