5 Free, Must-have Tools to Start Out Gamedev

Ever wanted to get into game development?

Yes?

Then read on!

You probably have wondered how to start out making your first game. Maybe you tinkered around with scripts or mods but never made something all by yourself. Fear not, for this article will give you an insight how to start out your development without much hassle.

Out of incredible amount of tools that exist to create games, I now present you 5 tools you should use starting out your first 2D game.

1. Editor: Unity 3D
   

   Unity is a cross-platform, user-friendly 3D engine that allows you to quickly get a game and some gameplay running without worrying too much about the technical side of things. It features a huge asset store and many tutorials that help you kickstart your game development. The engine can also be used for 2D games.
   

2.  Graphics Program: Krita
   

   To create all the game art you need, you will need a graphics program. A good choice here is Krita, which is a powerful tool to create your assets. I've used many graphics programs in my life, from Photoshop to PhotoImpact and Paint Tool SAI - and Krita has an astounding amount of features for a program that is open source.
   
   
   
   
   

3. Map Editor: Tiled
   

   If you want to make a game, you will also need create a world for it. The map editor Tiled comes very handy here. It allows you to create terrain brushes, add images and objects to the world and define properties for each. All in all it's a great editor that is free for you to use. To load Tiled maps into Unit3D, you can get this plugin to add TMX support to your project.
   
   
   
   
   

4. Music Editor: Bfxr
   

   What's a game without sound? With the free-to-use program Bfxr, you can create your own sounds from scratch - without worrying about permission or copyright.
   

5. Organizer: Trello
   

   If you do your daily dose of development, you also need something to help you keep track of your tasks and bugs! (Believe me, there will be many...) Trello helps you to do just that and get organized. You can create to-do lists and spreadsheets very easily. It's also available as mobile app. (Thank you @PeculiarCarrot for pointing out there is also Hack 'n' Plan for this purpose!)

If you want to check out a larger choice of tools, I recommend you to check the resource page.

Happy coding! If this inspired you, make sure to show me what you've made!