The Best FREE Software for Game Development! (In my Opinion)

you know what i can't stand wasting money especially on software now i get it there's some things in life that you need to spend more to make sure you're buying quality rock climbing gear is a perfect example but luckily for us we work in an area where spending more money doesn't always mean you'll get a better product take a look at blender for example it's a fantastic 3d modeling software that's completely free to use and has kind of become the industry standard for 3d modeling now there's a term for this type of software it's called foss or free and open source today i would like to share with you all the software that i use on a daily basis especially as a game dub not only that but i'll show you free alternatives to software that i've actually paid for so if you're struggling to find the right software for you or you just hate paying for stuff grab your notebooks cancel your adobe subscriptions and let's get started but first today's video is brought to you by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people explore new skills deepen existing passions and even get lost in creativity whether you're interested improving your editing skills for your devlogs or you just want to improve your game dialogue with a creative writing class skillshare has it all i really enjoyed the logo design with grid's class by george bocoa it really helped me out so much when creating the branding and logo design for my game studio feareth what's great about it is there's no ads at all and they're always adding new classes so there's always interesting to learn and explore and unlike software exploring new topics and learning new things is definitely worth the money and skillshare is very affordable it's less than 10 a month for an annual subscription a huge part of game development is self learning and there's nothing better than actually getting better and accomplishing growth is extremely satisfying and skillshare's online classes make it possible and for the first 1 000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description you will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership so you can explore your creative side before we get into the list of software i use and alternatives i want to explain a little bit more about foss or free and open source software basically it's free software that people develop and they leave the source code online so other people can take it and make stuff out of it before foss came around people used to use what was called proprietary software these are products like photoshop microsoft word or even game engines like unity now there's one point i want to make very clear just because a product could be free and you can use it to a certain point doesn't make it free in open source using unity or game maker for example even though you can use the engine on a basic level to really access most of the features or at least the important ones you have to pay a subscription or a single price unlike blender for example where you can use it and you never have to pay for it and you have all the features available to you i also want to emphasize that foss generally has better products for the most part because it's made by a community of people that just wants to make a really solid tool or piece of software and one last little disclaimer before we get started some of the free software i mentioned may not be fast but i tried to pick software that is actually widely used by people and is actually quality i mainly just want to bring up the idea of foss so that you can explore it yourself and find other great pieces of software that you never would have found before also just know that this is my opinion and if i left out a piece of software that you think is great and worth mentioning make sure to leave it down in the comments down below let's get started starting off we're going to talk about artwork and we're going to break it into four categories the first one we'll start with is pixel art for those who don't know i mainly use a software called pixel edit and it costs around ten dollars i tend to get a lot of flack for this because most people think i use a sprite pixelated is simple easy to use pretty straightforward there's no like bloat extra stuff that you don't really need it's just straight to the point and absolutely perfect for my game dev needs now some free alternatives to pixel edit would be ms paint if you're on windows it's fantastic as long as you're not doing animations another good alternative is piskel it's in browser and it's really easy to use or if you really want a sprite but don't have to pay for it you can get libre sprite you have to compile it from source it's super easy to do if you're on linux it's a little bit harder if you're on windows so make sure to check those out now moving on to the next section we're going to talk about raster artwork and really all that means is it basically has pixels so any software that's like photoshop now i think you may be surprised in hearing what my answer is i actually don't like photoshop at all i mainly use paint.net it's a super simple and straightforward photo editing software i believe it's only on windows and i've used it probably 10-15 years i do color correcting in it resize images i make my thumbnails in it it basically has everything i need now another great alternative that's actually even better is it really is a free and open source version of photoshop that's fantastic it does have a learning curve and i'm still learning how to fully utilize it but it's a fantastic piece of software and a great alternative moving on to 3d blender is hands down my favorite 3d software and to be honest it's probably the best open source software out there today if you're looking to get into 3d and you don't know where to start blender is the only option you ever need to consider and if you're looking for like 3d voxel software magic of voxel is fantastic and i highly recommend you should use it next we have vector now if you don't know what vector means it's basically artwork that uses mathematics instead of pixels so no matter what size you scale it at it's always going to be super high resolution now here's where i fall back into the proprietary trap a little bit i do use adobe illustrator just because that's what i use for my job as a graphic designer and i've i'm just really comfortable with it after using it for like seven to eight years with that said if you don't want to pay subscription there's software called affinity designer it's a one-time payment and it's basically as good as illustrator i'm slowly trying to learn it and migrate over it so i'm not spending insane amount of money per month now a free alternative is inkscape i would say inkscape is fantastic if you don't have any money at all and if you're just learning to use vector art start using inkscape it's a powerful tool but its biggest flaw is that it's really hard to pick up and learn so if you can start using it right away instead of being like me who has to try to learn to switch over from illustrator you're gonna be doing yourself a favor i also found another cool alternative called vector and it's basically illustrator but in your browser it's it's pretty simple pretty basic but you could do some cool stuff with it so make sure to check it out so next up i want to talk about game engines i think this is going to be pretty obvious for those who've seen my videos before but my number one choice for free and open source game engines is of course godot geto is fantastic and it's being developed by an awesome team and it just keeps getting better and better every single day i've completely fallen in love with it and the fact that i don't have to pay licensing fees or anything it's just i make a game and i can make money off it is truly incredible and to be honest i like it so much that even if it did cost money i still would probably use it now if you're intimidated by using code and you want to use something more like construct or scratch g develop is a great alternative that's also open source i've played around with it a little bit and it seems like a cool thing to make some mobile apps pretty quickly though i will give a little disclaimer that it does cost if you want to do more than a couple exports in a day and if you want to use their wireless remote play feature i still consider it a free engine because you have access to all the tools it's just those little extra things that most people won't need so that's why i include it on the list next we'll move on to the music and sound category the number one tool that i use for creating music is garageband i used it to create the music for blizzard blowout and even for calamari madness and maybe for dewjob the only downside is that it's only for mac so if you don't have a mac you're out of luck if you do it's great it's free and i like it now if you don't have a mac and you still want to make music there is a cool piece of software called bosca kyo i'm pretty sure that's the irish word for accordion but regardless it's pretty simple to use and it's great for creating tracks for your games especially if you're not really into composing that much now moving on to sound effects i use two different things for one i use audacity that's literally what i'm using to record this audio right here it's free it's great to use and for sound effects i want to generate instead of using bfxr or whatever that horrible generator is that too many people use i use lab chirp and it generates a lot better sounding sound effects they just sound cleaner they're not horribly piercing oh i just i just can't stand bfxr so those are the main categories of the software that i use now there's a few more tools that i use that don't really fit in the category so i just figured that we'd go through them real quick we'll call this the lightning round first off is video editing software i use adobe premiere just because i'm used to it and it has a lot of great tools if you're looking for an alternative davinci resolve is just as good if not better and it's completely free so check it out instead of using note-taking apps like google notes or evernote i actually use one that respects my privacy and it's called standard notes it's free to use it's fantastic it's encrypted and you can have it on your phone on your computer all sorts of places it's fantastic for writing notes and there's a plan to upgrade if you want to support them and have even better protection for doing live streams and recording footage i use obs it's really the best streaming software and it's fantastic it's super powerful and it's open source and free why not use it two quick other things i use are vlc editor for playing uh video clips and brave a fantastic browser that basically is google chrome but it doesn't spy on you and it has ad blockers it's just fantastic and it's great if you care about your privacy and don't want your web pages to take forever to load all right let's catch our breath so that's the list that's the list of software that i use and recommend that you use and that a lot of it's free and fantastic once again if i didn't list some software that you recommend please let me know in the comments down below i'm always looking for new software to experiment with especially if it's free and open source also shout out to buddy games heath sergeant james kennedy rybred and the rest of the wonderful amazing beautiful patreon supporters you guys are fantastic and you make making these videos possible if you like this video and you want to see more of this content make sure to like and subscribe and hit the bell notification it helps more than you know and i really appreciate it but as always i will see you next time on another gamedev adventure [Music] you

Channel: Goodgis

Views: 271,701

Keywords: goodgis, ohio, godot, devlog, how to create a game, dewdrop dynasty, construct 3, game dev, indie dev, game maker, game programming, game process, how to make, firith, firith studio, game jam, pixel art, free software, open source, FOSS, linux, Piskel, Affinity Designer, OBS

Id: SBmeEQOh20A

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021