I don't know about anyone else but I have often seen some utter bullshit flying around comments sections and other places about how these big AAA developers 'need' a huge budget to make their games and how it's impossible to make games without a lot of money. I don't know why this utter myth perpetuates but I know for a fact having done it all myself and put in huge amounts of research you do not need a massive budget at all to make a good quality game even if it's 3D. Now sure, you can argue the case if we're talking about making something crazy like the next Skyrim for example but if you want to do something smaller then that's completely doable
Let's say I wanted to make something like Fallout New Vegas ( Fairly small game by today's standards believe it or not ) on a budget now that's doable especially if you're not too fussed about graphics and platformers and the like or much smaller game ideas. In fact it's actually blown my mind how much easier it is and I'll talk anyone thinking about it through some of the software you can use now that is in fact I would argue superior to the incredibly pricey bordering on rip off industry standard software now.
Godot is a free and open source game engine that has been mentioned around the game development community here on quite a few posts so lets start with that. I've been an avid user of Unity for almost 5 years but I have almost been completely won over by Godot simply due to the fact that that the engine is so incredibly light weight and doesn't seem to be loaded with bloat the way Unity is. Not only that because it's free and open source it's a perfect fit for indie developers on a budget and you don't have to worry about any sort of licensing issues the way you do with software made by big tech. There are going to be limitations of course but honestly, considering how feature rich Godot is it has completely blown my mind how good it is not just at 2D games but also you it is flexible enough to handle 3D and has proper support for multi-threaded games. Did I mention that it's free and open source? You can of course still use Unity and there will be things it does that Godot can't, but I think like others it is becoming harder for me to justify using Unity for all but the biggest projects and even then Godot clearly seem to be quickly catching up with it's features. Just because of it's light weight nature and how it even supports 3D games very well and keeps getting better I have been completely converted by the software as I've gotten used to the workflow and I'm learning their in house script. Recently though for users transitioning over on the programming side they have actually added support for C# so you could conceivably port your work from Unity over to Godot fairly stress free even though the feature is in Alpha.
It also has an incredibly well put together documentation page that comes with proper tutorials: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/
Want some software for making even some basic 2D images for your games? Got you covered, Medibang, GIMP and Krita are all perfectly viable options for games development. Open source I've noticed does come with a bit of a caveat when it comes to 2D, if you really want to be able to draw properly you do need a tablet. They're not hugely expensive you can get budget ones depending on the brand like say XP-Pen which is what I personally use but you do need to do your research on the software before buying. Say you want to use GIMP on the regular, make sure the drivers are actually supported for the hardware you buy otherwise you will have a drastically varied experience. Medibang I've found seems to work okay for older tablets but it's a much easier option to simply get an up to date tablet that has proper drivers which is what I ended up doing and everything is working great now. To get around the problem of compatibility I would often draw my textures in medibang and then import into GIMP so I could generate normal maps. Medibang is software that's primarily marketed towards people who want to draw anime/manga and even has brush settings pre-configured for you to do that.
With that in mind GIMP is what I've been using quite a bit now I have a properly supported drawing tablet, as previously mentioned you can generate things like proper normal maps for use in 3D software with GIMP this will help you make detailed textures no problem and I have found GIMP to be another amazingly feature rich open source software for what it is. Although I haven't used it much because of the aforementioned annoying tablet issues I think I should also mention Krita from what I've seen it does a lot as well and that might be worth a try it all depends on what you're using the software for and down to you to experiment to find out what works best.
Finally one of my personal favourites that has turned me into a fanatical cult member is Blender. I used to be a Maya user back in the day and yet again the sheer power of this open source software and what you can do with Blender has completely blown my mind. Blender really can do literally anything right now as it is, being blunt, it used to be pretty shit but that just shows you how much work the devs and community have put into making the software not just feature rich but fairly user friendly for what it is. When I say anything by the way I mean just about anything, except perhaps being image software. Not only is it a standard 3D modelling software if you look at the splash image that comes up when you first load up you can create a 2D animation project which loads up the software's 2D animation features for you all pre-configured with that you can use a tablet to get drawing and create some really nice 2D animations. I thought I'd mention this because it is something that is kind of tucked away. As for the 3D it is absolutely murdering the traditional big tech offerings of Maya and 3DS Max, you can even use it for video compositing and effects if you're not actually interested in games development and just want to try your hand at making your own movies or shorts the possibilities are endless.
The interesting thing about many triple-A games is they spend more money on marketing a few times over than they do on the game itself.
We are in the age of the indie game developer and they are running circles around the slower Triple-A studios with a fraction of the budget and a whole lot of inspiration.
I won’t be shocked when some extreme budget game using a bunch of open-source software beats a triple-A game hands down.
Thanks for sharing some amazing tools. I myself have not looked to much into Godot. I look forward to hearing more about it in the future.
Yeah, Cyberpunk 2077 is a classic example of that, it relied far too much on marketing, I've been talking to people as well and a lot of these 'AAA developers' are really just artist sweatshops which is why instead of actually fixing anything game breaking they just churn out DLC after DLC. This is probably because not only are good programmers rare that actually know their shit but they would rather pump out skins etc. for F2P markets than produce any kind of real content and now that the market for these item shops is completely over saturated they're going to be struggling to make money.
Forget about big budget, any developer with any sense that adopts these new tools is going to absolutely murder the competition. Simply knowing even a bit of code and being able to implement your own creative ideas will immediately put you ahead of most games, the rest is just polish and making sure what you release isn't broken.