🕹 Benko's Game Jam Powerlist
A curated list of resources, articles, tools, etc. for developing games at game jams.
⚙️ Game engines
Beginner-friendly
- PICO-8: A "fantasy virtual console", which is actually a 128x128 and 16 colors mini-engine. It uses Lua as a programming language, and features a very small set of instruction.
- FREE Bitsy: A simple tool to make retro, short narrative games or tiny adventures.
- FREE Twine: An engine for text-based narrative games.
For people who (would) like to code
- free Godot: 2D and 3D game engine, with a Python-like language and C++/C# bindings.
- free Defold: 2D game engine aimed for mobile and Web games, by King. It uses Lua.
- free Phaser: JavaScript 2D game framework, for Web games.
- Unity: 3D and 2D game engine, can build for most platforms. It has a free tier. Coding is done with C#.
- GameMaker: 2D game engine, can build for most platforms. Coding is done with a custom scripting language.
👾 Game design
Books
- A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster: a must-read book that explains why humans find games fun.
- Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton: a very hands-on approach to game design, prototyping, project iteration, play testing, etc.
️👩🏽💻 Programming
Tools & apps
- Github: Git repository hosting, with a free tier.
- free VS Code: Good text editor, with Intellisense (Win, Linux, Mac).
🖌 Art
Articles and tutorials
-
The Pixel Art Tutorial: a good introduction to making pixel art. It covers the main techniques, such as drawing lines, anti-aliasing, dithering, choosing a palette, etc.
-
Pedro Medeiro's pixel art tutorials in Patreon: These are short, visual lessons in GIF format, each one explaining a specific point, by the artist of games such as Celeste or Towerfall.
Assets
- Kenney Assets: high quality art assets for games, with a Public Domain license.
- OpenGameArt: collection of assets for games (mostly images) with Creative Commons licenses.
Tools & apps
- Pyxel Edit Pixel art editor (Win and Mac).
- Aseprite Another popular pixel art editor (Win, Linux and Mac)
🎹 Audio
Articles and tutorials
- Developer's Music Making Guide: Introduction to compose and make music tracks for games. It covers scales, chord progressions, beats, melody…
Tools & apps
- free Bfxr.net: online sound effect generator, chiptune-style.
- free Bosca Ceoil: a beginner-friendly music tracker.
🔗 Useful websites
- Itch: game & game assets marketplace. Good for research, inspiration and to purchase assets.
- GDC Vault: archive of GDC (Game Developer Conference) talks.
- Gamasutra: the reference website of game development.
🎉 Game jams
- Ludum Dare: remote/online game jam, with thousands of participants all around the world. 2 editions per year (April and October).
- Game Jams at Itch: hundreds of game jams are hosted at Itch.
- Global Game Jam: a large game jam, with physical locations all around the world. 1 edition per year (January).