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[yigitcan]

I think Unity it the only one that's sitting on the throne when it comes to free game making software.
I looked out for alternatives like jMonkeyEngine, Blender, Game Maker (for 2D), UDK vs. vs. and there's only Blender and UDK that can compete with it.Other solutions seem like can't make you go further than making school homeworks/projects.

This situation kinda scares me as i think i'll get stuck using Unity as it will be my only choice when it comes to game making.

[Netsu]

Dunno about Blender, but I'd say Unity, UDK and Game Maker are the three most used game making suites and there's a ton of commercial successful examples for each of the three.

Hotline Miami, Spelunky, Super Crate Box, Dustforce and god knows what else has been made in Game Maker for example, so it's more than capable of going beyond school projects.

[Ant]

if you can't make a substantial 2d game with gamemaker then the fault is with you and not gamemaker

[Geti]

Fwiw if you stick with learning C# in unity you won't have too hard a time transitioning to standalone development or any of the C++ based frameworks/engines/solutions out there (including UE4 these days). I agree with the guys above that game maker is capable for just about any singleplayer 2d game you can think of, though its networking options are kinda average.

Cryengine is another notable example to check out if you've got a big team to work with and a budget :^)

Honestly, for solo development, use whatever is comfortable and gets results as quickly as possible.

[HDSanctum]

Unity has a solid all-roundedness that beats all other competitors, eg: you can target low end mobiles/3ds or go hard with some of the latest techniques on high end PC's, all in one package. UE4 is high end mobile/PC only with support for newer tech like dx11 and tegra devices only, I haven't used GameMaker in many years but last I knew is the 3d side is a second class citizen.

Vision engine + Project Anarchy might be a competitor, however I found it a bit daunting to get into so I couldn't say much more. Its visual editing tools seem very capable, but comparing to UE4 and Unity they leave a lot to be desired on the UX front. The positive aspects include a lot of free middle ware that you would otherwise need to pay for, solid performance on my test device and potentially powerful rapid deployment tool that can let you see small changes on your test device quickly. It's a very professional-oriented tool, a bit too much for my taste.

There are some emerging engines that seem to be trying to compete with Unity, such as s2 engine and http://www.genesis-3d.com , but I haven't tried those.

Two indirect competitors are Polycode and Godot, unfortunately mobile support is not mature. It doesn't fill me with hope when the devs on Godot don't seem to acknowledge/have time to test mobile compatibility. Html5 deployment is a toy that doesn't seem to work as expected on the samples I tested, but that's not important to me. My biggest gripe is that these two engines seem best suited for mobile, but are not 100% ready for it yet.

Going in another direction, there are source-only engines such as Minko, Wave engine, Loom SDK and Gameplay3d which look interesting. In particular I had positive experience with Minko, however android support isn't available to test yet.

Right now I am delving into Urho3d, and in my opinion it's probably the closest all-round competitor to Unity that I have run into, even the API is rather similar. I am enjoying it enough on my test project that it will probably become my go-to for solo projects. Like Unity, the included features 'just work'.

Ahem, you could imagine how unproductive I have been testing different engines. Just stick with what works for you, until it doesn't.

[Polly]

There are plenty of alternatives .. but they are simply not as popular / well-known.

[indie11]

For solo development, Unity is probably the best game engine. You can find so much stuff related to unity on the internet. You got asset store with awesome tools, graphic assets and what not!

[InfiniteStateMachine]

You could look at the Phyreengine

The dark souls games among others were made with it.

[Ky.]

Don't forget Torque2D and Torque3D

They're both open source and free now, and still very powerful. Torque2D 3.0 jsut rolled out with full Android and iOS deployment support as well.

If you're wondering what Torque is, it's a full featured free game engine that you used to have to pay for. It's developed and maintained by the guys from Dynamix, and the original Torque3D engine was built to power Tribes2 back in the day. Since then the engine has seen numerous updates and upgrades, and spun off Torque2D as a separate suite of tools.

The engine is powerful enough to the point where you dont NEED to modify any of the engine code, and can make any game imaginable just by writing in the scripting language, known as TorqueScript.  In many ways, it resembles an Indie version of Unreal Engine that way

[husainhz7]

In my experience, jMOnkeyEngine is the best you get for free. It takes the same time to make a game in unity ie its fast. You will almost never feel stuck. It's great for one man dev. iterative development. you have everything for 3d game dev. Supports all 3 PC desktops and android. Otherwise unreal engine 4 is the most time saving engine out.

[SolarLune]

^ That's interesting. It seems like I always get stuck with jME or Godot on exporting my models to show up in-engine. For Godot, I chalk it up to it just being in alpha-stages and having some bugs here and there in importing models. For jME3, I dunno. I don't want to say it just stinks... I guess I just suck when it comes to exporting my models or something? It seems like it's very, very unclear when it comes to actually importing models, especially since there's multiple ways to go about doing this (i.e. in engine with blend files, in engine with OGRE XML files, out of engine via conversion to j3o files). A simplified tutorial that kind of walks through the steps to a simple approach with the engine would be appreciated, I think.

I use Blender, and it's pretty solid overall. No mobile support, but it's the fastest at implementation. Not everybody's cup of tea overall, and it's starting a transition phase at the moment, so it may not be the same engine a few years from now that it is now. Anyway, I like it.

[bombjack]

Hi,

It really depends of what you want.
If you need something rock-solid where you can control everything, go for a C++ engine or write our own.
I've experience with Irrlicht and Ogre3D: they are both great engine to work with.

As far as my day job is in Java, I've tested a lot Jmonkey and libgdx.
They worked quite well.

But now that I've tested Unity I'll stick with it.
As far as I'm concerned, Unity is really the best choice if you need quick result and ease of use.

But in any case if you choose an engine, stick with it and finish your game, that really the hardest part 

[Sik]

If you want something that's basically like Unity, there's Godot:
http://www.godotengine.org/

Note that Godot is rather new, so I don't know how it compares feature-wise (and documentation seems lacking yet), but it's portable to a lot of platforms. The biggest downside is probably that it lacks anything comparable to Unity's asset store. On the upside, it's free no matter how much money you make, and you even get the source code so it's not a lost cause if it stops being maintained in the future.

Disclaimer: I know one of the guys behind that engine. Also I'm planning to give it a try in the future to see if I can make a 3D game without having to write my own engine.

There are some emerging engines that seem to be trying to compete with Unity, such as s2 engine and http://www.genesis-3d.com , but I haven't tried those.

Genesis3D still exists?! O_O (unless it's another engine with the same name)

[Jeff Skyrunner]

Has anybody tried Construct 2?

It's very powerful for 2D games (theorically also 3D... theorically), and now it has also a multiplayer integrated management.

[Ege]

Has anybody tried Construct 2?

It's very powerful for 2D games (theorically also 3D... theorically), and now it has also a multiplayer integrated management.

how powerful is it ? it runs on html5

[Jeff Skyrunner]

how powerful is it ? it runs on html5

Yes, it's all html5

[Nelvin]

Another is https://www.madewithmarmalade.com/

For those who prefer working in code it's a pretty decent choice. Sadly it's not as well known as many others even though they approached the multiplatform problem in a very interesting way, you can even build iOS games using Visual C++ on a Windows machine.

[SolarLune]

Genesis3D still exists?! O_O (unless it's another engine with the same name)

Yep. Reality Factory does too. Reality Factory does too.

[Sik]

> Previous version: 29 July 2009
> Current version: 23 April 2014

Oh wow, that's a five year gap. Then again The Games Factory got resurrected... yeah OK, I guess this may be steering off-topic (even though it's still naming more game making tools) =P I got surprised about Genesis3D because when I had last used it the engine was made around a software renderer... I think it was on its early days. I had just assumed it got killed off because of how awfully outdated it felt even back then.

[nikki]

http://www.zgameeditor.org/  comes to mind

Create games that have a redistributable size of only 64kb or less using procedural content. The game engine use OpenGL for graphics and a real time synthesizer for audio. ZGE is Free Open Source Software.