A few weeks ago we posted about Game Maker doing a Humble Bundle, and it seems like game engines getting onboard with the whole deep discount high value bundle thing is a hot new trend that’s awesome for hobbyist game developers. This time around, Clickteam Fusion is available via Humble Bundle. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, try this on for size: Clickteam is the engine that Scott Cawthon used to create the Five Nights at Freddy’s series of games. (Here’s him first posting about it on their forums.) So, who knows, FNAF has pretty much proven that the sky is the limit with Clickteam, much like Crashlands is one of the benchmarks for what you can do with Game Maker.
Anyway, if you’ve never done a Humble Bundle, it’s one of those pay what you want affairs. The money is split between Humble, the developers, and a charity (in this case, Josh Farler Foundation). By default, it’s split pretty heavily in the developer’s favor, but you can move sliders around to determine who gets what. It all can go to charity, you can split it between Clickteam and Josh Farler Foundation, leaving Humble entirely out of the mix, or whatever you want.
Paying even a buck gets you Clickteam Fusion 2.5, a few games, and a couple source code projects to dig around in. Pay at least $7 and you can export the stuff you make in Clickteam Fusion out to Windows programs and a few more games and source files. For our purposes, you’ll want to pay at least $15 which (among a ton of other things) gets you the plugins to export Clickteam Fusion projects out to iOS and Android. All together, you can pay $15 (or whatever you want beyond that) for over $1,300 worth of games and software.
I don’t really have any super strong opinions on what’s the “best" of these various game engines, as they all have their own strengths and you can make super valid arguments for using any of them. Like Game Maker, Clickteam Fusion is real easy to use, so if you’ve ever had an idea for a game kicking around in your head, $15 isn’t that much to spend to try to execute on it, in the grand scheme of things. And, hey, it’s always fun to learn how to do new things.
