Top 5 3D Game Creator Engines

3D gaming has been the accepted standard for video games for many years ever since it was popularized by the launch of the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Today, 3D assets are even used in modern 2D games. Because 3D assets have a large amount of data contained in them, a powerful game engine is required for smooth gameplay and animation. Below is a list of 5 3D game creator engines you can use to make your 3D games.

Unreal Engine

One of the most popular 3D engines is the Unreal Engine.  Developed by Epic Games, this engine has become an industry standard and has been used to develop many popular games.

It supports the C++ programming language to build your games and fine-tune unique experiences. Unreal also supports visual scripting using Blueprints for non-programmers. An entire game can be made with Blueprints, but C++ will allow you to optimize functions that ultimately make your game run faster.

Unreal has a variety of sources including an answer hub, forum, video tutorials and more to help you get started.

Unreal is free to use and supports publishing to all major platforms, but will take a percentage after a certain amount of revenue is reached.

Check out the full list of their titles here.

CryEngine

This is another popular game maker engine that has been around for many years with an evolving business model. Currently, it is free to use with custom licenses depending on your needs.

Like Unreal, CryEngine supports C++ development as well as more recently, C#. CryEngine also has a visual scripting option by using Flowgraphs. Many sources are available on their website to help you get up and running with the software.

CryEngine has free assets available for download through their marketplace which you can use to test out the software.

CryEngine is available only for the Windows OS and the platforms which you can publish to are somewhat limited. CryEngine also takes a percentage of royalties after a certain amount of revenue is reached.

Popular titles made with CryEngine include Prey, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, The Land of Pain, and Aporia: Beyond The Valley. See a full list of their showcase here.

Amazon Lumberyard

Lumberyard is a fork of CryEngine 3 and therefore currently supports much of the same features such as C++ and C# development. It is also currently only available for Windows OS and has much of the same publishing options. Lumberyard also has free assets available to download.

Lumberyard does not take any royalties but restricts online services to AWS or your own private servers. You may not use other cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.

Check out their latest titles in development. See the full list.

Godot

Godot is a free, open-source tool that has a large active community and is great for both 2D and 3D games. It supports C++ out of the box as well as the community developed language: GDScript. Various other languages such as Python are supported with help from the community.

Godot does have a visual scripting editor for non-programmers so as to not completely alienate the person not wanting to code.

Godot allows you to publish to the Web, desktop, iOS, and Android and does not take any royalties.

Popular titles made with Godot include Deep Sixed, Stereobreak, Shipwreck, and The Interactive Adventure of Dog Mendonça & Pizza Boy. See a full list of their showcase here.

Unity

Unity is a great engine for both 2D and 3D games: an industry standard for many businesses. Unity uses the common language C# and is, therefore, another great option for programmers. Because of its age, Unity’s community is one of the largest. This can be very helpful even for those prospective programmers because it means the community has most likely answered many of the questions you may have.

Unity’s has a version that is free for development and publishing, but revenue cannot exceed $100K. Its highest-paid version has no revenue cap.

Unity can publish to all major platforms.

Popular titles made with Unity include The Room, Ori and the Blind Forest, Hollow Knight, and Cuphead. See a full list of their showcase here.

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