Indie Friendly Development Tools

[LESS T_T]

Well Epic Games is generous than that. This month's free assets from Unreal Marketplace: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/featured-free-marketplace-content---may-2019

Unless otherwise noted (generally things made by Epic itself, Paragon assets for example) these things are free to use on other engines. Of course if they are not somewhat engine dependent.

 

[Alchemist]

I wonder how easy it is to port Unity Asset Store stuff (like models, animations and such) to other engines. Anyone here tried that?

I think their licence doesn't allow using the asset in engines other than Unity.

I looked into that a bit, and couldn't find it mentioned anywhere that you have to use them in Unity, as a general rule. Went through the Terms and Service and EULA. Individual asset creators can have their own additional terms though.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://spritestack.io/

SpriteStack is a 3d pixelart editor based on sprite stacking technique. Similar to voxels it's a fun and simple way to draw low resolution 3d objects that can be later used in games or submitted to the online gallery.

You need to pay $1 on Patreon to use export feature.

 

[Duckard]

Not sure if someone posted it, but MagicaVoxel is a free to use voxel editor: https://ephtracy.github.io/

I think their licence doesn't allow using the asset in engines other than Unity.

Not true. From their FAQ:

From these locations, you can drag and drop them into other projects, or even other engines if you wish to. Regretfully, we would not be able to provide assistance on how to get assets working in other engines.

 

[Ysaye]

Not sure if someone posted it, but MagicaVoxel is a free to use voxel editor: https://ephtracy.github.io/

I think their licence doesn't allow using the asset in engines other than Unity.

Not true. From their FAQ:

From these locations, you can drag and drop them into other projects, or even other engines if you wish to. Regretfully, we would not be able to provide assistance on how to get assets working in other engines.

I have used MagicaVoxel quite a bit and you can do some really awesome stuff...what does SpriteStack bring that is different?

 

[Alchemist]

Any fellow grid-based dungeon crawler vaporware devs here - check this out!
https://dungeoncrawlers.org/tools/atlas_generator/

Basically it greatly streamlines creation of 2D fake-3D wallsets for grid-based crawlers. A game-changer if you're going with 2D.

I may switch back to 2D from 3D for my project, considering this tool.

 

[pakoito]

Has anyone found a multiplatform engine that's not hostile to strongly-typed immutable patterns? I was considering Godot until I saw most patterns are untyped eventbus stuff.

 

[DavidBVal]

Has anyone found a multiplatform engine that's not hostile to strongly-typed immutable patterns? I was considering Godot until I saw most patterns are untyped eventbus stuff.

I thought you liked LibGDX!

 

[pakoito]

Has anyone found a multiplatform engine that's not hostile to strongly-typed immutable patterns? I was considering Godot until I saw most patterns are untyped eventbus stuff.

I thought you liked LibGDX!

I do, I do, I'm just going through a phase where I'm not feeling like shaving all the yaks related to mobile development. I was hoping Godot or Unity could give me a one-click solution to deploying on phones so I can focus on business logic.

 

[DavidBVal]

Has anyone found a multiplatform engine that's not hostile to strongly-typed immutable patterns? I was considering Godot until I saw most patterns are untyped eventbus stuff.

I thought you liked LibGDX!

I do, I do, I'm just going through a phase where I'm not feeling like shaving all the yaks related to mobile development. I was hoping Godot or Unity could give me a one-click solution to deploying on phones so I can focus on business logic.

By shaving the yaks you mean all the trouble with iOS? because for Android, I doubt you'll find an easier to deploy engine than LibGDX, especially if you already know it.

I work with Unity but I am not targeting mobiles now, so I can't help in that department.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I have used MagicaVoxel quite a bit and you can do some really awesome stuff...what does SpriteStack bring that is different?

I was actually developing a competing product to spritestack but gave up when I realised MagicaVoxel could outrun my program on every level. Sprite Stack is alright if you like working in an exclusively 2D environment its not a 3D program.
Magicavoxel isn't a 2D program its more a 3D program. My program was supposed to merge the two together. But I found out quickly that pulling off something that supports a 256x256x256 model was just out of the scope of the program. It was too hard to make it work with such big models.

That said mine supported a full frame by frame animation pipeline. Ah well only 3 months wasted on it so I don't feel too bad about it.

I'd say use MagicaVoxel. I just wish it had my UI lol. Its UI is very crude which is why I built this program but now I've grown to realise that my polygon workflow is better. Oh yeah and my program supported image planes which I'm sure MagicaVoxel doesn't support.

I'm in the process of building a game editor and I think I prefer to use a polygon based workflow instead of voxels.

 

[Bad Sector]

Any fellow grid-based dungeon crawler vaporware devs here - check this out!
https://dungeoncrawlers.org/tools/atlas_generator/

Basically it greatly streamlines creation of 2D fake-3D wallsets for grid-based crawlers. A game-changer if you're going with 2D.

I may switch back to 2D from 3D for my project, considering this tool.

Hm, if you are going to squish textures around (like this tool does) to make the tiles instead of hand-painting them, why not just use OpenGL to draw the maze? It should be much easier (especially if you stick with OpenGL 1.1 it'll take only a few lines of code) and faster. And you can do smooth rotation/movement animations too for almost free.

 

[Alchemist]

Any fellow grid-based dungeon crawler vaporware devs here - check this out!
https://dungeoncrawlers.org/tools/atlas_generator/

Basically it greatly streamlines creation of 2D fake-3D wallsets for grid-based crawlers. A game-changer if you're going with 2D.

I may switch back to 2D from 3D for my project, considering this tool.

Hm, if you are going to squish textures around (like this tool does) to make the tiles instead of hand-painting them, why not just use OpenGL to draw the maze? It should be much easier (especially if you stick with OpenGL 1.1 it'll take only a few lines of code) and faster. And you can do smooth rotation/movement animations too for almost free.

A fair point - but there a couple of reasons why the OpenGL solution doesn't fit what I'm looking for. Even though the atlas tool does much of the heavy art lifting of plotting out perspectives and such, I would still want to do some touch-up pixel work on top of the generated tiles to make them aesthetically pleasing, add little details to the closer walls, etc. Also, having pure 2D tile assets instead of real-time processing leaves the option of releasing for older platforms open (DOS, C64, Amiga, etc).

One of my long-term goals is to make a dungeon-crawler engine that can be ported to many platforms, even really old hardware with limited memory and processing power. The dungeons would be released as module files that can be loaded into the engine no matter what the platform was. Keeping the tiles to purely 2D makes that more feasible.

 

[Bad Sector]

Yeah that makes sense (though strictly speaking you could make a software renderer for DOS at least :-P).

 

[LESS T_T]

fmod now offers more generous free license for indies.

 

[Wysardry]

Unigine is now available in a free Community edition for those whose revenue or funding was less than $100K in the last 12 months (most of us).

Also, Castle Game Engine doesn't seem to have been mentioned in this thread yet. It's a cross-platform 3D and 2D game engine that uses modern Object Pascal and is open source.