Game Development Software for Beginners

Are you wanting to get into game development but not sure how to start? The most important thing is to choose a good, beginner friendly game development software stack.

There are many options out there but it is quite hard to find out which tool is the right one for you. All of the software out there appears to be the most beginner friendly but that is not the case.

I have experience with a lot of different tools so I can tell from experience what works for beginners and what does not work for beginners. This will differ from person to person though. What software wasn't a good fit for me doesn't have to be the wrong fit for you.

I have created a small summary with the software I have worked with and which ones I found most beginner friendly.

GameMaker
You have probably already heard of GameMaker. It is a great easy to use tool if you want to get into 2d game development. This will work great if you want to become a mobile game developer. GameMaker provides a easy to use interface that also makes it very easy to export your project to different platforms.

One of the problems I found with using GameMaker as a beginner is that the scripting can be quite hard at first. It isn't quite as intuitive as some of the other tools I will recommend here. The engine / software is free to use though, which is a plus if you are not ready to assign a budget towards your developer journey.

Construct 3
Construct 3 is a tool that is fully online. This has its drawbacks though. Large project can run a bit slow in the online editor. This was a huge pain for me when developing Hustle Life. Although construct 3 is a lot more intuitive for starting developers. I was able to create a game with over 100k downloads using construct 3 and I was pretty much a complete beginner to game development.

A con to the software is that it is not free to use. There is a free version but this version is in my opinion lacking the features you need to create a game. It is possible to create a game, it will just not be very big. The free version could be good as a first test though. I think you will pretty quickly get the hang of using their intuitive scripting flow.

Defold
This is a completely open-source engine. I really like that about Defold. The scripting is done in Lua. This is a programming language that is pretty beginner friendly. It is a bit like the scripting in GameMaker, it takes some time to get to know how it works. It is not quite as easy as using Construct 3, it will provide a lot more performance though.

Tastes Differ
It will be hard to determine which one is the right one for you. All game development software for beginners will require some getting used to and ofcourse some scripting, visual or code wise. For a deeper dive please check out my post game development languages, to find out more about scripting/programming languages.