The first game creation tools I used, were:
The Quill, 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quill
The Games Creator, 1984: http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/gam...
Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit, 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-%27Em-Up_Construction_Ki...
At least SEUCK has been used to make commercial (indie) games, and I think The Quill has too.
While not free, these were cheap. Cheap enough that kids were getting them.
SEUCK was awesome - I wonder whatever happened to Shaun Pearson, the guy who made all those SEUCK games for the Zzap!64 Megatape. I think Outtake Two convinced me to buy my copy of SEUCK.
"It’s something of a golden age of video game engine licensing. Not too long ago — hell, 5 years ago, licensing a big, brand name engine (including Source) involved gnarly negotiations, NDAs, and a small mountain of cash. Then Unity came along and changed the game."
Unity did change the game. There have always been game engines and game makers. But Unity was the first big name engine, with complete tooling, to go free. Suddenly developers had access to a full featured game engine with little upfront investment. If the game failed, it wasn't as big of a deal. If you payed the half a million for Unreal or Source, and the game failed, you had bigger problem.
Torque tried, but failed to compete. Blender, Orge 3D, Panda 3D, etc never became big name, widely used engines. They might be cheep/free, but good luck getting everything to work. The documentation and support just aren't there.
Modding is different. Unreal and others included their editor so you could mod the game, but you couldn't make a new game and sell it. You had to stay in the confines of Unreal/Half-Life/Warcraft/Starcraft. DOTA and Tower Defense came from the Warcraft 3 modding community, but they where still Warcraft 3. If you want to release your modded Warcraft 3, sell it, move it to other platforms, then you either have to pay for the engine, or use another engine.
I recently chose to give up on Ogre3D as I was completely frustrated by my inability to make it run on mac. It's also way too big (I don't know if OOP is a reason for that, but I still tend to dislike OOP nevertheless). For example it doesn't seem that you can choose to not use the scene graph.
I loved that engine at some point, but as time passed, I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to either build it (oh the pain) or make a project run across platforms (mac especially).
I recently found an opengl 3.3 core profile tutorial (learnopengl.com, it's really good for motivated beginners), I felt really better learning that since I like to understand how lower level stuff works and how to make things as simple as possible.
Unity/source/unreal engine are great when one wants to sell a beautiful, smooth 3D game quickly and doesn't have too specific or uncommon requirements. But when you want to experiment, there's nothing else than raw opengl.
I really wish Ogre3D was lighter, or that there was be a minimal engine with plain helper functions that let you use, understand and talk to OpenGL to make the best use of it. I can understand that indie devs want to be able to use the best 3D right away, but sometimes it can be nice to give more control to the programmer.
I guess I hard a hard time learning by myself, or that I'm just trolling out of frustration. 3D is not easy and sometimes I think some small dose of KISS would be appreciated.
http://www.lwjgl.org (their website seems a bit odd right now)
If you want slightly more than than(but still not a proper engine), I would wholeheartedly recommend libgdx: http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/features.html
You can try http://libcinder.org , http://www.openframeworks.cc or http://www.sfml-dev.org
the only real way to learn programming is by doing. no amount of reading can really burn knowledge into your brain. by implementing things like model->world->camera space transforms, quaternion rotation, shadow mapping, lightmaps, deferred rendering, etc yourself, you will end up intuitively understanding them.
And the Sony Yaroze (Playstation 1) and PS2Linux (Playstation 2). The PS3 doesn't count as it was a crippled version when compared to the hardware access level offered by Yaroze and PS2Linux.
The free SDK apparently had a 20% royalties clause at the point of commercialisation, so this deal sounds much better.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/220980/ http://www.cryengine.com/get-cryengine/eaas-faq
First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine.
HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has also contributed greatly by open sourcing their old engines.
The Torque Game Engine (Tribes) was opened up to low cost licensing by GarageGames in the early 2000s.
Unreal has long made their tools available for free, though licensing wasn't quite favorable to the indie developer until more recently.
Blender made an attempt at including a game engine but it never really took off from my point of view, although they're still including and improving it.
Even Blizzard's inclusion of map tools with Warcraft 3 spawned one of the biggest gaming trends of the past 10 years, DOTA / MOBA games. Though these have all been recreated with other engines (including Valve's Source), the inclusion of modding tools with games is part of the story and some of the competition that the current crop of free tools must face.
Open source deserves a mention as well. Ogre 3D, the above mentioned Blender, and other engines and especially tools have sprung up in a variety of games and often fill missing gaps in asset creation.
Unity certainly deserves some credit, however. Their simple tooling, relatively early start on mobile, and aggressively lowering the barriers from side project to published game has definitely moved the goalposts for game tooling. The Unity Asset Store is also a great thing.
I've really only scratched the surface though. XBox DNLA deserves a mention, the role of the iPhone and mobile in general has been huge, Minecraft's until recently ambiguous quasi-open source nature, and there's many more. We're in a golden age of game creation and I hope to play some amazing new game ideas. I realize there's also going to be an abundance of mediocre imitations from creators like me but its all part of the fun.