How to Make Your Own Game on a Zero Budget

Develop a video game and making it fulfill the goal of “being played” by many people, can be an exhaustive and somewhat expensive task. Although if you and your team (or if you are “alone against the world”: p) are passionate about their respective activities, the “exhaustive” part will take second place, and starting from the fact that you have a computer and an internet connection, with this post we will make the “expensive” become totally “Free” (one of the best words in the world 😀 ).

Next, we will state what we think are the main “Free” tools that you can use to make Video Games like a “Pro”:

Game Engines.

• With Unity you can create virtually any type of video game you can imagine and for a wide variety of platforms (in addition to having a lot of information on the web about its use).
• Unreal Engine is a “famous” and very “powerful” engine that allows you to make “amazing” video games for a wide selection of platforms.
• Finally we have Godot, another great game engine, very simple to use in which you can create “fabulous” video games in both 2D and 3D.
• Remember that in the discussion forums belonging to each video game engine you can find answers if you have problems with the installation of any of the aforementioned engines.

 Graphic Design and 3D Modeling.

• The “powerful” Blender is one of the best tools you should have if the creation of 3D models is involved (models creation, animation, video editing, and many other features);is free, and has a huge library of tutorials distributed throughout the internet (so there will be no problem to master it).
• The AI ​​tools that will help us a lot to create our 3D models are both Meshy and 3D AI Studio in their free versions as well as TRELLIS if you already have an image that you want to convert to 3D.
• When we talk about 3D models it is necessary to include the topic of animations, and one of the great applications to obtain them is Mixamo which will help us both to create the skeletons (rigging) for our humanoid models as well as to obtain the animations we want for them. Other good alternatives in their free versions are Anything World and Meshy.
• For  2D graphics and vector design, Inkscape and Gimp they are “excellent” tools that will be of great help for you (and the amount of information on how to use them is vast).
• There are many AI tools to create our 2D assets; but some of the ones that give the best results in their free versions are DeepAI, Leonardo.AI and ComfyUI.
• If you need to speed your work, you can also make use of the hundreds of resources you can find in the following links (remember to read and pay attention to the licenses that creators assign to their works, although the resources are free, in some cases the creators would ask you to mention them in your games or that their work has not to be used for commercial purposes) :
  • Freepik y Stockio (for vector design).
  • Game Art 2D, OPP, y Kenney (for 2D sprites and 3D models).
  • Google Fonts y 1001 Free Fonts (for fonts).
• If you use the “Unity” engine, the “Top Free Packages” section offers a huge list of the best free assets to download and use within this engine.

Audio Production.

• With LMMS you can make your own music and sound effects for your games.
• Audacity will give you everything you need related to audio editing.
• Like in the previous section, if you need to download resources, the following links will be very helpful:
  • Free Sound, 99 Sounds y  Play on Loop (for downloading themes and sound effects).
• The AI ​​tools that will help you create melodies for your projects are Yue and DeepAI which are completely free or the Suno and Soundful applications whose free versions will allow you to create great music for your games.
• Furthermore, when it comes to audio for your games, it is important to highlight the need to use tools that generate voices for the characters in your projects. In this way, both TTSMaker and F5-TTS will be very helpful to you.

Programming and Codes.

• It is best to have a “basic understanding” of programming in the language used by the selected video game engine (C# for Unity, C++ for Unreal, etc.); This is because there will “always” come a time when you have to use programming code to execute some desired action within your game (it always happens, we are not lying to you), and the best thing is that you can understand, even in a very general way, what the code is doing. In our “Tutorials” section you can find a section dedicated to the basics of programming in C# for Unity.
• Due to the above, the AI ​​tools that will help us the most to create the codes we need are DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Claude and Qwen, whose free versions will give us good solutions to the most common problems and requirements within video game development.
• Other ways to obtain information and answers to our problems with programming codes are the discussion forums belonging to each video game engine; Also you can always visit GitHub to find also very good answers.

Video Production.

• If you need to create a game play, OBS Studio and FlashBack Express are great solutions for screen recording.
• Now, to make a “kick-ass” trailer, Open Shot, DaVinci Resolve y Blenderwill be very helpufl.
• To get a huge variety of video resources (like backgrounds and special effects),  Videvo is a place you have to visit .

Publishing and Marketing.

As above mentioned, our video game has the main objective of “being played” by many people; so, we have to “Publish” it and develop all “Marketing” necessary so that people know it, play it and finally love it 😛 .

Marketplaces to Publish.

• Create an Amazon account to publish your games for free (Android, PC and Mac games).
• Also you can develop and publish games for PC in itch.io y Game Jolt.
• At Aptoide you can publish Android games.

For Marketing.

• The best way to let the world knows all your creations is by using the social networks, so, hurry up and start creating your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

We hope these tools will be of great help to you in the video games creating and publishing process . We will continue testing more resources to be able to recommend them in this post.

Remember to take a look at our “Tutorials” section to discover more advices on how to create your own video games.