/magictools

A list of Game Development resources to make magic happen.

Magic Tools

A list of game development resources to make magic happen. Created by awesome people for awesome people.

Graphics

Great graphics placeholders and tools to turn that squared game into a picasso painting

Assets/Placeholders

2D Tools

Spritesheet Tools

  • ShoeBox - ShoeBox is a free Adobe Air based app for Windows and Mac OSX with game and ui related tools. Each tool uses a drag and drop - or clipbord interaction for a quick workflow.
  • TexturePacker - Great spritesheet creation editor.
  • GraphicsGale - Animation graphic editor easy to use.
  • Spritesheet Preview - A simple and free tool to preview sprite sheets
  • Aseprite - animated sprite editor & pixel art tool.
  • PiskelApp - Free Online Pixel Art and Animated Sprite Tool.

Bitmap Compression

  • TinyPNG - Advanced lossy compression for PNG images that preserves full alpha transparency.
  • Kraken.io - robust, ultra-fast image optimizer and compressor with best-in-class algorithms.
  • PNGoo - Windows GUI for batch conversion.
  • ImageAlpha — Mac OS X GUI for pngquant and other tools
  • SuperPNG Photoshop plug-in — Mac and Windows. Comparison with "Save for Web"
  • Pngyu - simple PNG image file compression tool.
  • PNGGauntlet - Smash PNGs for faster sites

Texture Tools

  • FilterForge - A plugin for Adobe Photoshop that allows you to build your own filters.
  • PixPlant - PixPlant is a smart 3D texturing tool that creates high quality normal, displacement, specular maps and seamless textures from photos.
  • STG - a tool for creating professional seamlessly-tileable textures from photographs quickly and easily.

Character Generators

Tile Editors

  • Tiled - free, easy to use and flexible tile map editor.
  • ArrayPainter - Array Painter is the easiest and fastest way to make 2D arrays ready for copy pasting into your own program.
  • AutoTileGen - AutoTileGen is an automatic tileset generator for 2D game terrains.

Animation

  • Spriter - Modern tool for sprite animation.
  • Spine - Spine is dedicated to 2D animation, providing an efficient workflow both for creating amazing animation and for integrating it into your games.
  • Fusion Character Animator - small tool for Clickteam Fusion 2.5 to facilitate the animation of 2D character sprites for developers.

Vector/Image Editor

  • Inkscape - An open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X.
  • Krita - Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end-to-end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters.
  • Gimp - GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
  • Ormr - Ormr is a fast, light-weight, cross-platform procedural graphics editor.
  • Paint.NET - Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows.
  • PyxelEdit - Pixel art editor designed to make it fun and easy to make tilesets, levels and animations.
  • Pickle - Another Pixel art Editor.
  • Pixelmator - Full-featured image editing app for the Mac
  • Pixen - OpenSource Pixel Art Editor for OSX

3D Tools

Modeling

Terrain Generators

Voxel Editors

Code

Set of game frameworks, engines and platforms

Engines and Frameworks

2D

  • Cocos2d-x - a C++ OpenGL 2D and 3D game engine. Uses C++ but has JS and Lua bindings. Target all the major mobile platforms and operating systems. Additional tools CocoStudio and Cocos Code IDE.
  • Construct 2 - an HTML5 game maker, meaning you are not actually writing JavaScript. Instead, you use actions, events and conditions to do the heavy lifting.
  • ImpactJS - Impact is a JavaScript Game Engine that allows you to develop stunning HTML5 Games for desktop and mobile browsers.
  • Ejecta - A Fast, Open Source JavaScript, Canvas & Audio Implementation for iOS.
  • PixiJS - is a newcomer HTML5 game renderer - first released in early 2013. A main appeal of the engine is its use of WebGL for faster performance. If WebGL isn't supported, the engine falls back to standard canvas.
  • GameMaker - GameMaker accommodates the creation of cross-platform video games using drag and drop or a scripting language known as Game Maker Language, which can be used to develop more advanced games that could not be created just by using the drag and drop features.
  • Phaser - free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering.
  • Cocos2D - graphic library for games and multimedia, for python language
  • Loom SDK - 2D mobile app and game framework with live reload of code and assets, AS3/JS/C#-like scripting language, and powerful 2D rendering and UI framework. Open source with paid "Turbo" service.
  • Lycheejs - JavaScript Game library that offers a complete solution for prototyping and deployment of HTML5 Canvas, WebGL or native OpenGL(ES) based games inside the Web Browser or native environments.
  • MelonJS - open source light-weight HTML5 game engine.
  • LimeJS - HTML5 game framework for building fast, native-experience games for all modern touchscreens and desktop browsers.
  • EnchantJS - A simple JavaScript framework for creating games and apps.
  • Stencyl - a game creation platform that allows users to create 2D video games for computers, mobile devices, and the web.
  • RPGMaker - series of programs for the development of role-playing games.
  • FlashPunk - free ActionScript 3 library designed for developing 2D Flash games.
  • Flixel - an open source game-making written in ActionScript3.
  • Box2D - A 2D Physics Engine for Games.
  • p2.js - JavaScript 2D physics library
  • LÖVE - Lua 2D Game Engine.
  • Duality - C# / OpenGL 2D Game Engine that comes with visual editor.
  • SpriteKit - iOS/Mac 2D Game Engine.
  • NodeBox - a family of Python tools to create generative design.
  • PyGame - a 2D game engine in Python.
  • Processing - Processing is a programming language, development environment for artists, designers, researchers.
  • Monkey X - Multi-platform programming language and cross-compiler, aimed at fast game programming.
  • HaxeFlixel - Create cross-platform games easier and free. All with one codebase.
  • Bacon2D - A framework to ease 2D game development, providing ready-to-use QML elements representing basic game entities needed by most of games.
  • LibGDX - Powerful (totally free) library for Java, code once and run the game on desktop, Android, Web, and iOS.
  • Starling - The GPU powered 2D Flash API
  • CutJS - Lightweight, fast, interactable 2D HTML5 rendering engine for cross-platform game development.
  • XNA - Microsoft's game development framework.
  • Monogame - Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework.
  • MINX - Open Source 2D game framework written in C++ (to the style of XNA)
  • Farseer - a collision detection system with realistic physics responses.
  • Chipmunk2D - A fast and lightweight 2D game physics library.
  • Chipmunk C# - C# implementation of the Chipmunk2D lib.
  • Jitter - a fast and lightweight physics engine written in C#.
  • AndEngine - 2D Android Game Engine
  • Corona SDK - A Cross-Platform Mobile App Development for iOS and Android.
  • Gideros - A Cross-Platform framework to create Mobile Apps and games for iOS, Android using Lua programming language.
  • MOAI - Cross-Platform framework designed for pro game developers to create iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, Chrome and OSX games using C++, OpenGL and Lua scripting.
  • GameSalad - Game Creation Engine for Mac and Windows.
  • Agen - Cross-Platform framework for making 2D games with Lua, compatible iOS, Mac and Windows devices.
  • KiwiJS - a fun and friendly Open Source HTML5 Game Engine. Some people call it the WordPress of HTML5 game engines
  • PandaJS - Open Source HTML5 Engine.
  • SFML - Simple and Fast Multimedia Library.
  • SDL - SDL is a cross-platform library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D.
  • Allegro - Allegro 4 & 5 are cross-platform, open source, game programming libraries, primarily for C and C++ developers.

3D

  • Unity 3D - A development engine for the creation of 2D and 3D games and interactive content.
  • UDK - the game engine technology developed by Epic Games.
  • Havok Vision - a cross-platform game engine that provides a powerful and versatile multi-platform runtime technology.
  • Ogre3D - is a scene-oriented, real-time, flexible 3D rendering engine (as opposed to a game engine) written in C++.
  • PlayCanvas - A WebGL Game Engine.
  • Horde3D - small open source 3D rendering engine.
  • Panda3D - a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs.
  • Godot - Open source game engine with rich API.
  • Irrlicht - open source high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++.
  • Three.js - Javascript 3D Library.
  • Turbulenz - Turbulenz offers the ability to build, publish, iterate and monetise high-quality games that react like no others, with immersive 3D effects and real-time physics that open up a whole new world of unprecedented and extraordinary web content.
  • voxel.js - voxel.js is a collection of projects that make it easier than ever to create 3D voxel games like Minecraft all in the browser.
  • Bullet - Real-time physics simulation.
  • ODE - ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics.
  • Dash - A free and open 3D game engine written in D.
  • jMonkeyEngine 3 - a 3D open-source game engine for adventurous Java developers.
  • Polycode - Open-Source Framework for creating games in C++ (with Lua bindings).
  • Cinder - Cinder is a community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++.
  • Blitz3D 3D basic-like programming language for fast 3D desktop games.
  • Haxor - Combine the power of HaXe language and HTML5+WebGL to easily develop powerful applications that can run in any modern browser.
  • JPCT - jPCT is a 3D engine for desktop Java and Google's Android.
  • Spring - A powerful free cross-platform RTS engine.
  • Wave - Cross-platform engine written in C#
  • Urho3D - Cross-platform rendering and game engine.
  • Hive3D - Real Time Collaboration 3D engine.

Audio

Audio editors, sounds collections and more.

Collections

  • Freesound - collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds.
  • PacDV - royalty free sounds collection.
  • Musopen - Royalty free music.
  • Octave - free library of UI sounds.

Music and Audio Editors

  • Audacity - open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.
  • Audiotool - Online music producer.
  • Soundation - Online Professional music studio.
  • Audiosauna - transforms your web browser into a fast and flexible music production studio with built in synthesizers and live effects.
  • musagi - open source, fairly large and sophisticated music editor and synthesizer
  • MadTracker - a powerful and efficient approach to making music. Versatility and compatibility are guaranteed due to full VST™, ASIO™ and ReWire™ support.
  • MilkyTracker - open source, multi-platform music application for creating .MOD and .XM module files.
  • FamiTracker - free windows tracker for producing music for the NES/Famicom-systems.
  • Bfxr - A tool to make make sound effects for computer games.
  • jfxr - A JavaScript port of the Bfxr sound effect generator.
  • iNudge - Create sound patterns online.

Board Games

Tools for making board games

  • RPTools - a brand of open-source programs designed to enhance traditional pen-and-paper role playing games.
  • Boardgamizer - Board Game Design Idea Generator.

Must see

Blogs, portals, magazines and more

Blogs and Portals

Books

Magazines

Game Jams

  • CompoHub - A compilation site of many game jams in a timeline.

Complete Game Sources

Lessons

Online courses, tutorials, screencasts

General Game Development

Computer Graphics

Other Awesome Lists

Other amazingly awesome lists can be found in the awesome-awesomeness list.