The state of UGC game creator tools - January 2023 - Part 2
Andy Mauro
Founder | Product Builder | Team Builder & Coach - Working enthusiastically in service to teams and users to build cool things the world needs!
This is part 2 of my ongoing research into UGC game creation tools (You can read Part 1 below. I still haven't found anything that truly lets users/players become creators, but let's keep going!
Castles Game Maker: A seemingly powerful tool that supports a variety of different types of games, but that is definitely for developers as it requires you to download a code editor and Object Pascal compiler prior to using. Free. https://castle-engine.io/
Buildbox: Offers a neat no-code tool that is particularly good at vertical scrolling platformers. Their claim to fame is that they let you publish your game to their mobile app which makes it trivially easy to test and distribute across both iOS and Android. However, their parent company and forums show little activity so you may want to do some research before committing fully. https://signup.buildbox.com/
DotBigBang: This one is kind of mind blowing. They offer a fully realized massively multiplayer game world that lets you drop into creator mode at the click of a mouse all running within a web browser. Technically it's incredible, and the tools let you do a lot but, much like Roblox it's going to require programming to do anything interesting. They're only in alpha though so this is one to watch! Free to play and create. https://dotbigbang.com/
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Promethean AI: This one made it onto the list based on how cool their demo video was, but after checking it out it appears to be more of a tool to help 3D artists make their existing Unity and Unreal pipeline's more efficient. May be worth checking out if you're an artist, but won't help the uninitiated create a game! Hopefully some day the ease with which they showcase placing 3D assets will results in a fully playable game world! https://www.prometheanai.com
Defold: Another powerful developer tool that reminds me of GameMaker. Now owned by King (the makers of CandyCrush), they still seem to continuously release updates. Seems particularly well suited to 2D/2.5D RPGs, but supports a wide variety of other genres like horde shooters, adventure games and the like. This one is for programmers only. Free. https://defold.com
Overwolf: These guys are kind of the grandaddy of mods and in-game apps. They offer APIs built on top of the Electron framework that lets creators use javascript and HTML to build overlays to support things like statistics, strategy help, third party integrations and more. They provide funding, distribution, and monetization tools, so they're definitely supporting a type of soup to nuts UGC, but it's still all programmer focused. For creators looking to make money and who want to build tools that sit on top of games instead of actual games, Overwolf is a great solution https://www.overwolf.com/
I'm still working my way through an ever growing list of tools that I plan to try out and write about. Let me know if I'm missing any!
Account Executive at Full Throttle Falato Leads - We can safely send over 20,000 emails and 9,000 LinkedIn Inmails per month for lead generation
4 个月Andy, thanks for sharing! How are you?
Founder | Digital Marketing Consultant | Fractional Marketing Leadership
1 年Cool project! Some others for kids: greenfoot, kodu. But at an old STEM enrichment program I used to work at, it was Scratch, GameMaker, and Unity (for VR too).