Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

The Game Engine Competition Heats Up

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 18, 2016

Lumberyard_EditorShot_MeadowOver the last couple of weeks, the competition for game engines has gotten more interesting. Now, I’ve got zero interest in abandoning Unity at this point. I’m pretty comfortable with it, and it has so far proven to be every bit as powerful as I need it to be. But for those still looking at other options, we’ve got ’em. Besides GameMaker Studio and Unreal, I mean….

First off, Amazon has released Lumberyard, a CryEngine-based system that’s tightly integrated with Amazon’s own web services (AWS). It’s currently in beta. The best news is the price. According to the website, “Amazon Lumberyard is free, including full source code, so you can deeply customize Lumberyard for your team and your vision for your project today, and for future projects in years to come. There are no seat fees, subscription fees, or requirements to share revenue. You only pay for the AWS services you choose to use.”

For a AAA-quality engine, this is a pretty decent deal, but the catch is that yes, you have to use their services. If you have a single-player game that doesn’t store information to the cloud, then that’s no big deal. But otherwise… yeah, you are locked in by the terms of that agreement. For some studios that could be a deal-breaker, but it really depends on your needs, budget, and faith in Amazon being your online services provider.

GGMaker_Editor_tiles2

And now, we go from a high-end AAA engine to something on the low-end for beginners. GG Maker may have been around a while, but it’s new to me. I hadn’t heard about it until just a few days ago. This one seems to be aimed more at the GameMaker studio crowd, emphasizing 2D games and an extremely easy, graphically-assisted scripting. It sounds like now that GameMaker has moved from being an educational tool to more of a commercial game development, this tool is trying to fill in the gap for beginners or artists who don’t feel very comfortable with programming yet. As a programmer, I’d be a very poor judge of this… these kinds of tools are more likely to impede me than help me.

Now a tool that would generate custom art for me, that’d be cool…  🙂

The full version is around $70, and advertises support for developing games for Windows, web (HTML 5), and mobile.

So if you are still looking at potential tools to make your dream game,


Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 2 Comments to Read



  • Alchemist said,

    Also worth a look is the Godot Engine. I’ve recently begun making my CRPG with this and am very impressed with it. It has a dedicated and very capable 2D mode, but also does 3D too. 100% free and open-source (it’s aiming to be the Blender of game engines.) The main thing lacking right now is completed documentation and the size of the community using it. Which is why I mention it whenever I can!

    There are enough docs, tutorials and demo projects to examine to learn how things work though, and the devs and community are very quick to answer questions.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    So I have to ask… how long were you waiting for it? 🙂

    I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t looked too closely at it. Thanks for your comments on it!

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