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What are the best open source game engines? that can work on a potato... (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by QuietStorm@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/programming

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So what good open source game engine sare out there i know about things like godot but are there any others? i keep wanting to make a game but coding just gos right over my head but still i want to mak eone. it dosent help how my pc is low-end-ish (8gb of ram, windows 10, nvidia 1030 card).

im not even sure how to code or if there is a more visaul way to make games, i would prefer 2d btw becasue it seems easyier for beginner. im not even sure why i want to make a game but i just do maybe becasue im a nerd-ish and it give sme a goal/hobby.

also please share anything you feel is needed aswell and remeber im bascily a absolute beginner who dreams way too big.

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[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depending on what you want to make, there's a few different options:

For old-school SNES-era-styled RPGs, RPG Maker is a viable coding-lite option.

For visual novels, Ren'Py is pretty easy to pick up.

For mobile games, Corona is pretty slick (and free).

For general purpose 2D game development, Gamemaker Studio offers a drag-and-drop, "coding-lite" option as well as actual written code, Godot is a powerful engine but complex to learn, and Unity is a popular engine that, while not really optimized for 2D, can function as a 2D game engine, with the downside of being a bit overkill, and being very unfriendly to folks unfamiliar with writing code.

[–] QuietStorm@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ren'py and game maker interest me can you tell me more about them, are they free, how do i start, and feel free to share whatever. i think visaul novels are cool but i cant draw jack and they look hard to make and mos thave cut scenes or menus or just detail.

[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago

Ren'py uses Python (which is an easy to learn language), and has a lot of built-in functions that are specifically geared towards visual novels - text boxes, character portraits, that sort of thing. You can find a pretty good quick-start tutorial here. Ren'py is 100% free.

Gamemaker Studio is a very beginner-friendly (while still very powerful) option; it allows for a much wider range of projects (as it isn't geared towards one specific genre, like Ren'py). It's "free"; it uses a subscription model, but there's a free "demo" version that (unless something has changed) you can use forever; the only substantial limitation is that you can't compile a final game build with it... if you get to the point where you have something that's finished and ready to publish, you can subscribe for 1 month to their premium license, compile your game, and cancel it. It has options for actual programming, or a "drag and drop" interface, where you're basically building your game logic using ready-made "blocks" that you input data into to tell the engine what to do. It's pretty intuitive and a good place to start. There's a wide range of tutorials here.