Every problem I ever had with a game development engine, only made me hope for something better.

After all, we’re independent developers, not activision! What the hell is an “indie” anyway? I’d even grown a sort of disgust at the term, as if saying it, without having published anything, was being fake. The word felt vapid. Like calling yourself an e-celebrity, or apple putting an i in front of everything.

(Don’t you know its year 20xx, we attach coin to brands now! Dogecoin, ecoin, walmartcoin, hospitalCoin for when you really really just want an appendectomy).

This is my newsletter, Y Intercept, and the story of my many embarrassing failures, and what I have learned from them.

Indie Game Development Tools
https://yintercept.substack.com/p/...

Stay tuned for more, like "how I once redesigned the same interface over two thousand times."
and gems like
"I wish it was more like Minecraft, But With Guns - and the awful ads that FLOODED the internet from that one little, terrible, god awful suggestion."

there’s also defold open sourced engine / editor from king - developers of candy crash saga

from old guard also starling and / or haxe are big and used by small companies

@vane I looked at Defold for a while but the early onset alzheimers had gone and wiped that memory!

Also I don't trust anything owned by china. Seems like a lot of companies open source or make a tool free when they no longer have the money or desire to significantly support it. Don't know if thats the case with defold though.

Haxe is cool, wish I saw it used more.

Definitely not amateur friendly though, all things considered. Encountered lot of low level issues getting things to run out of the box.

I've seen more than a few people say, if it take more than five minutes to get console output in your language, than its dogshit.

Haxe passes that test, a lot of tools don't.

king is from Sweden not China :)
they were acquired by Activision-Blizzard and they open sourced their 2d game maker that is behind candy crush saga and made foundation around it, they still use it and develop it

continuing on indie games software

From js there is phaser js that I spent some time to build a game using it but never finished. Now there’s like 5th time I try to make a game, maybe this time it would work cause I decided to make card board game like gwent instead of converting isometric 2d rpg and I started from backend this time

there is pure view engine pixi.js,

3d three js made by ex flash developer, another one by ex flash developers called babylon js

I remember alternativa3d for flash was a big thing, also papervision3d, anything flash related to game engines was precursor of current indie game industry, everyone remember simple but creative flash games

From things around textures there is free texture packer.

From 2d skeleton animation there is spine (paid), dragon bones, coa tools for blender

finally for pixel art there is aseprite (paid)

those are I more or less know :)