Game Design and Programming Resources
This page is curated and maintained by Paul Palmer (he/him), a librarian and hobbyist game developer. He loves finding new and different game engines and tools and seeing what they can do. During the library’s shutdown due to the pandemic, he made a series of YouTube videos covering lots of freely available game engines and how to use them. He has an itch.io page where you can play some of the games he’s made. This site will attempt to organize relevant resources for various game engines, tutorials, and asset resources to help you in your journey to make your very own games.
Below you’ll find tools to help you in various aspects of game design, from selecting the engine you want to use, to tools and resources for your art and sound. Lastly at the bottom of the page is a list of suggested resources for furthering your coding skills, which can always come in handy, even when dealing with low code or no code game engines. If you have any questions or comments about the resources listed here, feel free to contact me.
If you’re looking for a good place to start making games quickly and easily, GDevelop is free and open source. This is probably my favorite game making program to use at the moment. It’s extremely easy to get something up and running quickly. You can download it to your computer, or just use it right in your browser if you want to give it a try. Comes with lots of tutorials for different styles of games, or example game starters. You’re given several export options, including making a standalone executable or an HTML 5 game that can be played in-browser.
Below are some video tutorials by GDevelop, showing how fast and easy it is to get started. The first shows how to set up a Mario style platform game, the second shows how to get started making a Pokemon-like top-down RPG, and the last is a step by step tutorial on making a top-down enemy wave based shooter game.
This program lets you make an entire real Game Boy game with no coding at all, it’s all drag and drop. In this case it’s all about setting up logic and events. The final product can even be played on a Game Boy emulator, or even on actual Game Boy hardware if you have a flashcart to send the game to. A guy on YouTube called Pixel Pete has a great series of videos that show you what the engine can do and are easy to follow along with. GB Studio has even been used recently for games made by companies like McDonalds and Nike!
The one major hurdle in this engine will be making original graphics, or even the process of importing. Where most modern drag and drop editors just let you bring in an image, then you can resize it and do whatever you want with it, this program is very strict about what images you’re bringing in, what size they are, and what color palettes they contain. This is because this is making a real working Game Boy game, and so it has to follow the specifications of the Game Boy hardware. Use the Piskel sprite editor to easily make sprites the Game Boy can use. In the same vein, making levels isn’t as easy a dropping down some images like most drag and drop editors. Instead, you’ll have to use a tile editor, like Tiled.
GB Studio is constantly getting new updates, and is as of this writing up to version 4.0, supporting Game Boy Color palettes, various different kinds of games genres like sidescrolling shooter, top-down RPG or platform games.
Ren’Py is a free engine made specifically for making visual novel games. To learn how to use Ren’Py, just go to renpy.org and click “documentation”, they have a very clear and easy to understand intro. If you look around online there are a few places to find free to use character and background assets that can come in handy, especially when you’re just making a first test game.
PICO-8 is a “fantasy console”, meaning it acts like an old 8-bit computer from back in the day, but never existed back then. But that’s good, because it has a ton of modern sense to it to make programming on this console super interesting. There are tabs at the top of the screen that go to different parts of your program, from your code (written in Lua) to a graphic editor, sound and music editor, and map editor. Software are so small that they are actually stored in the PNG file of the picture of the cart! Sharing your game is as easy as putting the picture of the cart on social media for others to grab!
PICO-8 isn’t entirely free. It’s pretty cheap to purchase, but there are free ways to play the games and even try your hand at the game creation. On PICO-8’s main page you can load up all sorts of games, with a link to more in the corner. So playing them is free. And there’s a new Education Edition that’s browser-based, but other than that is essentially the same as the paid version (there may be some restrictions on saving your game, or perhaps exporting it to the PNG cart).
PICO-8 also has a great tutorials and resources page with links to all sorts of information, including zines, cheatsheets, and YouTube tutorial video series. The website Nerdy Teachers is dedicated to Pico-8 with a lot of great resources, including a quarterly webzine showcasing new games and programs, with programming tips and tricks.
Self-described as “a little editor for little games and worlds”, Bitsy has become a very popular tool with indie gamers. Bitsy is very simplistic, and most games focus around simple tasks like walking around and talking to people, collecting some basic items to use somewhere and the like. Everything is done in-browser and with severe limitations, such as all graphics consist of 8×8 sprites with two colors.
You can make additional character sprites to interact with, such as the cat in the example, and items to put in your inventory. You can draw additional rooms that connect and have sprawling maps. Clicking the “tools” option at the top gives you access to more features like exits for rooms and an ending scenario. The “about” window has a link to a very useful tutorial to follow along with and links to the Bitsy community to see what others have done with the engine.
The great thing about the engine being so simple is that it’s easy to start playing around with it, and after you do, you can check out other’s games to see how creative people have gotten with something so small!
I’ll link to the tutorial below, which also has a link to highlighted games using the Bitsy engine. They are worth taking a look at for inspiration!
Twine is a freely available engine to easily make your own “interactive fiction” games. These titles used to be known as text adventures back in the day, but seeing as how they don’t always necessarily have to involve adventure, the name eventually changed.
Twine lets you map out stories in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style. You write out what you want the page to say, then when you write the options the player can click on at the bottom of the page, for example “Leave the spaceship and head west” or “Wait to see if your friends return”, Twine will automatically generate pages linked to those options so you can write what happens when you click on them. You can use basic HTML to spruce up the pages, including images, sound and music, and changing fonts.
Find some story prompts online to jumpstart a story idea, or even just make some interactive fanfiction! It can be whatever you want! Here are two example games that might help you see what kind of things can be done with Twine, King of Bees in Fantasy Land and The Often Ending-Story. Both have a humorous feel to them and may give you an idea of what can be done with the format. If you’re feeling stuck with how to use Twine, don’t forget that back on twinery.org are tons of examples, a wiki, Discord and more to help you figure out how to do what you want to do!
Game Resources and Tools
Sortinghat – This handy website gives you a series of questions on what kind of game you want to make, then points you in the direction of game engines or other resources that will help you based on your answers!
Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup – This is an interactive page where you can click on the search terms you want, for instance ‘free’ and ‘game engine’ and it will give you a list of links. Lots of tools and engines to play around with in here.
Sound
BFXr – https://iznaut.itch.io/bfxr – this is a cool online tool that can help you make various video game sounds easily, like jumping coin collecting, etc. Fun to play around with.
Freesound – Free to use sound effects. Check the creative commons license for each sound however, as some may require attribution.
Tiled – Free tile map editor – Some programs like GB Studio may require you to have a map premade, and this tool lets you do that.
OpenGameArt – In addition to freely available art, OpenGameArt has lots of music for people to use in their games for free!
Free Music Archive – Searchable free music database with different licenses.
Graphics and Art
https://kenney.nl/ – This place has free game art assets! Lots of them! Makes it easy to mock up a game or level.
OpenGameArt is another place for free assets. Check the creative commons license for each sound however, as some may require attribution.
Unsplash – Free photography to use for projects
Pixabay – Free photography, vector art, illustrations, and movie clips to use for projects
Freepik and Vecteezy – Free vector art
This free online sprite editor tool makes it easy to design sprites of all kinds. With a free account, it will save your work to the cloud. Piskel is even the built-in sprite editor in GDevelop now.
Coding Resources
FreeCodeCamp has a lot of self-directed courses in a variety of different topics. It can be a bit overwhelming at first, but I encourage you to look around and just see what you can find. If you sign up for a free account, it will remember where you left off and what you’ve completed in different courses.
The /learn tab at the top will take you to a general breakdown of courses you can find there.
The /news tab will show you the latest articles on a variety of topics.
You can then view the topics by tag. So, for instance, everything on game development can be seen here.
Their YouTube channel is also a great resource. Want to go through a whole Harvard course on game development for free? The whole 14 hour course is available in a series of videos here! Or a nine video course from Harvard on intro to computer science here!
LearnPython.org – as the title suggests, this site will take you through various Python lessons, and lets you code in the browser to follow along.
CodeAcademy – This is a nicely designed site where you can learn lots of different coding languages, but while some are free, some require a Pro membership.
Hacker.io – This site is pretty unique, it’s a collection of community submitted and voted links to lessons on coding for free (or you can check the ‘free’ box on the list of lessons). Just select what you’d like to learn and you’ll get lots of options from lots of different sites.
Learn to code for free – Here is a huge list of places where you can learn to code. The site helpfully gives some info on each site and what you can learn for free on them (because some, like CodeAcademy, offer some for free but charge for things like Python lessons)