Open Source or Free Engines

[Marchegiano]

I use three pretty often or used to before I had a kid really. Don't see folks talking about them so I figured I'd give y'all a heads up on some easy to use engines. You can make your own game or download others.

Mugen - Fighting games, it's very good.

OpenBOR - Brawlers like Streets of Rage, also very good

OpenSurge - Platformers, easiest of these three

RPGMaker - RPGs, duh, not used this since I was a kid so best I can help with is 2k.

If anyone's interested I could dig around for some games I've made. From memory the last things I made were a fighter featuring the men common characters are based off and those common characters, so like Bruce Lee and Fang from Tekken and Kang from Komat. For the brawler, ShaqFu/Steel. Kinda like Power Rangers but Shaq. You go about in the Shaq Fu sprite whooping on punks until you get enough power to transform into Steel, the super hero played by Shaq. Then you really bust heads. and for OpenSurge my last project was an Aero the Acro-Bat reboot. Basically just Aero in Sonic. RPGMaker, no clue, I wouldn't have it anyway.


Anyway, lads, there's free an open source engines to make sweet games with. Y'all should get on it....make me some ****.

[Gideon lock]

Salmon & veal sandwiches are the truth!

[Scopedog]

Also worth noting is that the classic Doom games (Doom 1 and 2) have been open source for a very long time, and people have been making usermade campaigns for them for like 20 years now. There are hundreds if not thousands out there available for downloads and many of them are not only better quality than the original Doom games themselves but are better than many modern FPS games in their own right. It's Doom so obviously it's not likely to actually look better than many new games, but there are usermade programs called sourceports that basically let you play Doom with modern FPS controls, greatly improved graphics and a whole host of other modern features, and it's still a great option if you don't a powerful PC to play on (though if you're playing on some of the very large maps with the GZDoom sourceport that may not be the case.) There's also a whole heap of mods out there that change and improve the gameplay in literally hundreds of ways - you might have heard of Brutal Doom, but there are many others that change things up in interesting ways. You do need to own a copy of either Doom 1 or 2 depending on what custom mapset you want to play (most of them use Doom 2) but each game is like 5 bucks on Steam and opens you up to a nearly infinite amount of quality usermade content. It's been one of my primary tools for keeping myself sane in lockdown, just playing endless amounts of Doom. I strongly recommend the mapsets Ancient Aliens, Eviternity and Back to Saturn X if you want to try for yourself, and the mods High Noon Drifter, Final Doomer and Nashgore. Here's a video that showcases some popular maps and mods and gives a quick rundown on the different sourceports and how they work.