awesome-gamemaker VS GDevelop

I'm in love with Gamemaker, which got me interested in programming: https://gamemaker.io

My 9-yo son has been making games with GameMaker https://gamemaker.io/

It's a popular framework for creating 2D HTML games and publishing them on sites like Crazy Games.

GameMaker has a lot of great tutorials and templates that makes it easy to get up and running. I usually just set him up with one of the existing game templates and let him loose on customizing the characters using the built-in tools. Then I help him customize the game interactions. GameMaker has two modes: one for visual flow editing and one for directly editing the code. It's a great onramp to learning to code with a super low barrier to entry.

I started my hobby game development journey with Game Maker Studio - https://gamemaker.io . Now I've switched to Godot for its simplicity and rich set of advanced features to actually build almost AAA games? if that's a thing.

Many popular game engines use this tiered approach including Unity, Unreal Engine, and Game Maker. However, many free and open-source software engines are released under the permissive MIT license.

Assuming you don't have any prior programming experience, since your goal is Undertale modding it might be best to start by learning how to use GameMaker (with the GML programming language, not the drag-and-drop): https://gamemaker.io

List of useful links for gamemaker https://github.com/bytecauldron/awesome-gamemaker

GameMaker Studio 2 Creator 12 Months

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