Free Game Media Resources
Here are some resources that you can check out to get FREE media (images and music) for developing your video games with.
- stock.xchng (for free images) – http://www.sxc.hu/
- 8bitcollective (for free images and music) – http://8bitcollective.com/
- The Freesound Project (for free music/sounds) – http://www.freesound.org/
- Magnatune (for free and paid music) – http://magnatune.com/
- Newgrounds Audio Portal (for free music) – http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/
- Jamendo (for free music) – http://www.jamendo.com/en/
Popular Game Development Tools
Here’s a brief introduction to some of the video game development tools that we’ve talked about in a number of our club meetings. You can use these tools to actually create your own games! The target users for these game development tools range from beginner to advanced, so there should be something here for everyone of any skill level. This page is intended to change and grow as new and better video game development tools are discovered, so please leave some comments below about any others that you think are particularly great, and they may be added to this list in the future.
Pygame
Initial Level of Difficulty: Intermediate – Advanced
Pygame is a FREE set of Python modules designed to help you write your own games quickly and easily. Games that are made using Pygame can run on nearly every platform and operating system, so your games can essentially be played on any modern computer (no vacuum tubes, sorry). To get the most out of using Pygame, it’s important to know how to program in the Python programming language, but this programming language also happens to be one of the easier languages to learn. In fact, our club intends to successfully teach all club members how to program in Python and use Pygame during this year, so keep a look out for tutorials that will be posted on this website and for workshops that we may have during some of our club’s meetings. It’s worthwhile to note that many of the games that have been made for the UTGDDC’s Game Making Deathmatch have been made using Pygame, including last year’s winner, Powderkeg. If you want to learn more about using Pygame, you can visit its website at:
Unity
Initial Level of Difficulty: Intermediate -Advanced
The Unity multiplatform game development tool, which is FREE to use, can help you make your own impressive 3D games relatively easily. In addition to creating games for consoles, computers, and handheld devices, one of Unity’s most impressive abilities is creating visually amazing 3D games that can be downloaded and run within a web browser. It’s difficult to fully appreciate this until you’ve tried out one of Unity’s demonstrations, like the seemingly Far Cry inspired Tropical Paradise demo. There are a large number of features that the Unity game development tool provides, like a 3D map editor and three commonly scripting languages that can be used to customize your game with and to find out more you can go to Unity’s website at:
Gamemaker
Initial Level of Difficulty: Beginner
Don’t let its initial level of difficulty fool you; Gamemaker is a very powerful tool with increasing popularity among developers of the indie gaming scene. It allows you to receive the instant satisfaction of creating your own simple video games with its intuitive drag and drop interface, but it also can help ease you into basic video game programming concepts through the use of its own customized scripting language. There are also a ton of Gamemaker tutorials floating around on the Internet, so if you’re ever stuck trying to achieve something that you don’t really know how to do, a simple Internet search for the appropriate Gamemaker tutorial could very well get you the answers that you need. Gamemaker can be downloaded as a trial version with limited features, or you can get all of its the features with the full version Gamemaker for $25. Many artists love using this tool, and there have already been a good number of unique video games released that were developed in Gamemaker.
http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker
Multimedia Fusion 2
Initial Level of Difficulty: Beginner
Multimedia Fusion 2 is not free, however, it does have a free demo that you can download and try out. As demonstrated during one of our game club’s meetings, Multimedia Fusion 2 is an impressive game development tool that lets you make your own 2D games in a ridiculously short amount of time with essentially no computer programming knowledge! This is made possible by allowing you to set various options for each type of object that used in your game. For someone who doesn’t really know anything about game programming, this tool does a very good job of giving you the general concepts of how game programming works without forcing you to learn the technical details of writing computer code first. Visit the website for Multimedia Fusion 2 at:
