Public domain baby. Fill in those gaps in your sfx library.

Make Godot maps in Trenchbroom or whatever else. There's a 3.x version available as well.

BeamBrain here! If you know about me as a game developer at all, it's probably because you played Xenologist. My current project is something more ambitious - I finished most of my previous games in under a year, but I expect this one to take several years, and I'm doing it in part to shore up areas I haven't gotten as much practice in - those being level design and graphics.

The project you see in the screenshot above is a Zelda clone - more specifically, from one of the dungeons, the Phoenix Temple. I'm taking heavy inspiration from titles like Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, but limiting myself to four "main" dungeons and one final dungeon to keep the scope manageable. Gameplay will include the staples you'd expect of such games - venturing into dungeons, battling enemies, avoiding traps, solving puzzles, defeating dungeon bosses, and gathering new abilities that allow them to better fight and explore more of the world. Standard stuff, but I'm not looking to make anything groundbreaking, just competent and enjoyable - if I can make the Zelda clone equivalent of plombir, I'll be happy.

The game takes place in a fantasy setting in which the hero's homeland is invaded by a conquering empire. The empire begins digging into the earth and exploiting the land's resources, and in doing so, releases a corruption that drives the native creatures to mindless rages. The poison works its way so deep that even the land's guardian deities - the Minotaur, the Gryphon, the Phoenix, and the Unicorn - become maddened, isolating themselves in their temples, warping them into deadly labyrinths designed to keep out or kill the ones who they once protected. If a hero can defeat these gods in battle, though, they will return to their senses, and out of gratitude bestow the hero with a portion of their power. If anyone can gain the power of all four gods, they just may become strong enough to drive out the empire and liberate the land. And one young man, after ambushing an imperial soldier and stealing his sword, sets out to do just that.

I haven't thought about music yet, but I'm leaning more toward something in the vein of Brain Lord or other Enix RPGs of the era than the music style of zelda games from the era.

So, to return to the title: what the hell should I call this? I'm 7 months into development and still can't decide.

It is split into chapters.

I figured it would be a good idea to have a list of free resources for the community
If you have something to add to the list, leave a comment!

Game Engines

• Godot is free and open source
• Unity is free unless you make over $100k but is not open source
• Unreal engine is free unless you make over $1 Million but is also not open source

Asset Creation

• Blender is a powerful free and open source 3d modelling program
• Krita is a free and open source art program
• Gimp is a free and open source image editing program
• Laigter a free program for creating normal maps
• Tiled is an open-source 2D level editor.@[email protected]
• LMMS a Digital Audio Workstation similar to FLStudio - @[email protected]
• Inkscape a vector graphics editor (.svg and other) - @[email protected]
• Paint.net a simple image editor - @[email protected]
• Pixelorama a pixelart editor, fully FOSS, unlike Aseprite - @[email protected]
• Material Maker as the name implies, a tool for creating materials for 3d graphics - @[email protected]
• LibreSprite is a fork of the last FOSS version off Aseprite - @[email protected]

Free Assets

• OpenGameArt has a huge selection of free game assets, from audio to 3d models
• Assets · Kenney Great source of prototyping assets - @[email protected]
• Tiled is an open-source 2D level editor. - @[email protected]
• Musical Artifacts a large selections of various soundfonts, uploaded by users - @[email protected]
• FreePats a collection of specific instruments as soundfonts - @[email protected]

Misc

• Freya Holmér on YouTube has several playlists of explanations of vectors, shaders, normal maps, and other useful mathematics. - @[email protected]
• TinyTools Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup - @[email protected]
• VSCodium a very popular code editor, with Microsoft telemetry ripped out - @[email protected]
• Notepad++ a lightweight code editor for Windows - @[email protected]
• Audacity a very useful tool for sound recording and editing - @[email protected]
• MuseScore an app for music sheet notation - @[email protected]
• OBS a program for screen recording - @[email protected]

It's of an area that's a hastily built lab in an old farm supply store

It's about time

So I'm making models for this game I'm working on. It's going OK so far, but I'm learning Blender at the same time, so it very often feels like I'm missing things that could make my workflow easier or that I'm not using the program to its full capabilities.

There are of course a plethora of tutorials, but they often don't feel relevant for what I'm doing (relatively low-poly tanks) or I have a specific question that they sort of answer, but it's in a context where I end up having to manually do a lot of fine-tuning to make the process work with what I'm doing.

Should I just start from scratch and spend a few weeks learning a bunch about the program that may or may not be useful to me? Carry on doing things the hard way? Is it all the hard way in the end?

I dunno, just feeling pretty out of my depth and questioning what I'm capable of.

For instance I just did UV layouts for my first model, (separated into several simpler objects, thankfully) and it took a long time of individually moving vertices on the map and copy pasting coordinates to get it comprehensible. I don't even know where to go from there. What if I want to do bump-mapping? What do I do when some of my objects have island errors when I unwrap?