armory VS GDevelop

What's really missing is an open source "bring your own engine and asset pipeline" editor tool. Game editors have pretty much arrived at the Unity data model and editor workflow (game object outliner to the left, scene view in the middle, property panel on the right, asset panel at the bottom, plus custom panels).

The Unity Editor and asset pipeline is hackable enough to use it as editor for another engine, I did that in the past as "proof of concept" and it definitely works, but is most likely a legal minefield.

Blender is also definitely hackable enough to serve that role (see: https://armory3d.org/) (again I did something similar in the past with Maya, it kinda works, but this wasn't very popular with artists because they were overwhelmed by the UI).

There are two primary contenders to replace the BGE. One is Armory3D (https://armory3d.org/) It has a ton of potential, and outputs to multiple formats including web. But it's a one-developer show and it's been really inconsistent. I taught a class on prototyping 3D games with it, but updates are slow and inconsistent, as is the documentation. Too bad, because it's a promising project, with a blueprints-like visual system and Haxe (basically an open-source actionscript) as the programming language.

https://armory3d.org/features is more of a game engine than just a 3d renderer but not as advanced as unity or unreal in certain aspects. One can write game logic in c/c++/rust -- https://github.com/armory3d/armory/wiki/wasm

Website

Armory3D is also interesting, not a fork of the original BGE AFAIK but integrates with Blender.

Armory3d

I don't know what it's worth, but Armory3D is also an engine built with Blender : https://armory3d.org/

5 × GDevelop Gold license for 12 months

https://gdevelop.io/ <- free, very easy

It's not as monolithic as you'd think. There are lots of engines out there but their communities aren't very vocal compared to Unity, Unreal, and especially Godot's community.

Take a look at: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

And

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-generous-space-of-al...

If you look at both of these you'll see just how many engines there are and neither of these cover everything. There are plenty of engines popular in the Python community that no one outside of it are aware of. Such as Arcade [0], Python-Tcod [1], Ursina [2], UPBGE [3], and Panda3D [4]. But based on your description you'd really like https://gdevelop.io/. It embraces exactly what you're describing where you can build a game but just installing entire features others have made and put online into your game.

[0] Beginner friendly 2D library:

[1] Rougelike: https://python-tcod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] Beginner friendly 3D engine (built on Panda3D): https://www.ursinaengine.org/

[3] Blender Game Engine Fork: https://upbge.org/

[4] Highly flexible code first 3D engine: https://panda3d.org/

I'm not really a game maker, but would like to give a shout out to the fabulous https://gdevelop.io/

It has everything you need, is free and its VISUAL PROGRAMMING is fab...

After they switched to a monthly/annual subscription fee with the release of construct 3, I pretty much threw in the towel and switched over to Gdevelop.

https://github.com/4ian/GDevelop

Open source, completely free, and I can run it as a native application on my computer versus a weird web app. The idea that my game is basically tied to a SaaS is just not OK for me.

gdevelop GitHub releases