Of course there’s no secret sauce to making great games, and there’s little correlation between the technical complexity, budget, graphic styles etc, and the ultimate success of a game. Surely Pac Man had nowhere near the visual richness of Halo and yet, both games could certainly be considered ‘successful’ (blockbusters in fact).
Aside from the subtleties of what makes a game entertaining, in 2010, there are a whole host of technologies that will make almost anyone’s game vision come true. Of course it’s extremely helpful to have some basic knowledge of computers and maybe even some artistic skills, but all these aside, the tools are readily available to everyone.
At Blabbelon, we use a lot of different products to make things happen, but in this posting I’m going to give a high-level overview, with a focus on products that are free. Yes, FREE. And while cheaper isn’t always better, in much of what I’ll describe below, in most cases they’re arguably just as good. Also, at Blabbelon, we’re pretty much an all Apple MacIntosh shop, so any of the tools we’ve selected need to work cross platform both PC and Mac.
1. Game Engines: there are a ton of incredibly impressive technologies to make your game development drag-and-drop. We use a game engine called Unity3D, because it’s highly versatile for PC and web games as well as mobile (iPhone or Android), and it’s a very mature product. Great news is that they have a base product that is free, and pretty darn functional and well documented. As mentioned, there are a ton of others, and again, I want to keep this first post high level. Another totally free (and open source) game engine is SIO2.
2. 3D Packages: these are software products to help you create 3-dimensional models as meshes, and then add skins to add color and texture as well as bones so that you can make your creations move around. 
By far the industry standard is Maya made by Autodesk, and it’s amazing stuff. Unfortunately it also costs 5K a pop…eew. A no-compromise alternative that is totally production-quality is a product called Blender, and it’s free.At Blabbelon, we actually use both (Grant is a Maya beast), but we veer towards using Blender. Since it’s free, there’s no reason why everyone can’t and shouldn’t download it so that the whole team can view, edit, and add input to the artwork as it develops. Best of all Blender 2.49 integrates seamlessly with Unity3D. Make a Blender mesh and save it to your Unity project and voila, it just simply appears in Unity3D…double click the Blender file from within Unity, and again, like magic the Blender file opens up for you to edit. It’s sweeeeeet. I’m a Blender junkie, so definitely more posts on Blender in games to follow. FYI, Blender even comes with a built-in game engine. You can check out Yo Frankie, which is a game that was made using Blender and SIO2. You can download the game for free (I think they even give you the source files).
3. 2D Bitmap Art: well there’s almost nobody who hasn’t heard of Adobe Photoshop, and indeed the latest Creative Suite products are amazing. They even have some great 3D features that I’ll write about in another post. But in the meantime, again, with a focus on Free…nothing beats the Gimp. Feature-rich, Gimp will let you do anything Photoshop can. So if you want to touch up a texture on your latest zombie using detailed brushes on various layers and cool filters, well, give Gimp a try. 
4. 2D Vector Art: again, Illustrator is the bomb…but it costs money. If you want to make some nice precise icons or do-up some 2D sprites for a game but you don’t want to drop a load of cash, try Inkscape…it’s free, it does absolutely everything, it has tons of documentation, ’nuff said.
In closing, I’d like to point out three things:
First, the choice in opting towards free software comes in part because the tools we’ve found are extremely functional and comparable to the industry “gold-standards”. Also, however, is the fact that at Blabbelon, every person in the company is geographically dispersed. That means we have no office, and everyone works from home. It also means that it would be impossible to buy just one copy of Adobe Creative Suite to install on the “2D workstation” in the office or Autodesk Maya to use as the “3D workstation”. We needed to think of software solutions that would service the whole company, in a financially acceptable way, without sacrificing functionality. So while there are tons of other options out there, the products listed have worked for us, and hopefully this list will serve to save you countless hours of research and due diligence.
Second, is the shameless plug for Blabbelon’s core voice product. Since we are a virtual company, with some of us in New York, others in California, yet others in Europe…it’s crucial to have great communication tools for groups. 
We all log into Blabbelon every day, where we’ve set up our own little room, and talk and text all for hours. It works great, and we couldn’t live without it. When we want to expand on a conversation and have an in-depth meeting, sometimes push-to-talk is not ideal, so we then swap over to Skype. Again, both Blabbelon and Skype are totally free.
Lastly, as I’m sure many of you reading this post will comment, I’ve neglected to mention SO many other comparable products out there. But I’ve tried to keep this as cursory as possible, as I’ll take deeper dives into each of these product categories in separate posts to follow. Also, people should note that I am 100% self-taught, and have no business writing a blog post like this. So whatever I know comes from a bunch of Google searches and Youtube vids. There are sure to be others who are a lot smarter than I, but I’m happy to share what little I know 
-Ed
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). Will also try to think of ideas to make the crane game even more engaging and fun. Lastly, Gordon is working on putting it all together…the box, the claw mechanism with any items to grab and some kind of scoring system (maybe experience points?). It’s all good.
