EDvent Calendar: Day 23 (Game Design Goodies)

Unleash the entrepreneur in your students. If you've ever played Angry Birds, or even heard how much money the developers make each month, you can see that game design is an incredible rewarding career (in every sense). For students who show promise in programming, here are three good open source engines to get them building games relatively easily.

1. Spring RTS "Spring is a project to create the best RTS engine ever (no joke). There are three principle goals which we hope to achieve:

• Build a flexible and powerful 3D RTS engine that can handle large numbers of units and state-of-the-art special effects and animation.
• Support new games and maps with powerful built-in Lua language support that allows game designers to realize their goals and develop better and better games.
• Support end-users, fix bugs and provide the best support we can."

Stencyl

2. "StencylWorks isn't your average game creation software; it's a gorgeous, intuitive toolset that accelerates your workflow and then gets out of the way. We take care of the essentials like physics and native APIs so you can focus on what's important—making your game yours."

3. http://unity3d.com/ is an editor and engine that lets you author for desktop, web or mobile and has nice features such as an asset gallery/store built in.

Unity 3D