Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

A plethora of game development tools exist today, that range from simple, drag-and-drop tools to very complex commercial game engines. This page represents a small sampling of various game development tools, but by no means is exhaustive.

Adobe's Flash - Flash is one of the basic game development tools, often used to develop casual games that can be played over the Internet within a web browser. The use of Flash as a game development tool is growing and many sites are starting to appear online that contain large catalogs of online Flash games, such as Jay is Games.

SmartFox Server - This is a server architecture utilized to build multi-player flash games. The popular children's game, Club Penguin, is built using this server infrastructure. One of the benefits of SmartFox Server is that the server technology is entirely free until you have multiple users connecting at the same time. This provides developers the chance to experiment with the technology before making a purchase.

3D Game Studio - This development environment is a nice middle-ground authoring package between a casual game development tool like Flash and more complex tool like the Torque Engine. We currently have one PSU faculty member utilizing 3D Game Studio to produce a game to educate students on the use of non-standard engines that run on alternate fuel types.

Torque - The Torque engine, by Garage Games, has been in existence for quite a long time and has been used to create games for the PC, the Nintendo Wii, and the Xbox 360. Garage Games also offers several advanced plugins for the engine to ease the development process.

NeverWinter Nights - BioWare's popular NeverWinter Nights game series also comes with an editor that allows users to create custom content. Several educational institutions have used this engine in the past, including several projects from MIT's Education Arcade, to create educational experiences. One caveat to using a tool like this is that the end user needs to have NeverWinter Nights installed on the computer in order for the mod to run.

Source - From Valve, the creator of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, comes the Source engine. This is the technology used to power Half-Life 2 and many other popular games like Counter Strike. This engine has a massive development community because people all over the world use the engine to create modifications, or mods, to existing Valve games. Counter Strike, Team Fortress, Portal, and many other games today were all created using the Source engine. Fans of these games can often use the engine to create new maps or levels for existing games built using Source.

Unreal Technology - Unreal Tournament has been around for over a decade, and Epic has made a business of licensing the Unreal technology to other game developers. The Unreal engine is currently one of the premiere engines on the market, used for many AAA games such as Gears of War and BioShock. The engine itself can be used free of charge for educational projects.

StudyMate - This program from Respondus creates Flash drill and practice games. You can also use the Respondus Test Creation Tool in conjunction with StudyMate to create tests and games that work together! Both StudyMate and respondus work with ANGEL - you can even do a direct upload from them into your ANGEL course or group. To see an example within ANGEL, enter ANGEL and do a Group Search for "Educational Gaming Commons." Join the group, and you'll have access to sample StudyMate games. If you wish to see the games outside of ANGEL, see this site.

ANGEL Game Tools - ANGEL has a crossword tool and a quiz show tool. Both are useful for creating drill and practice activities to reinforce facts and concepts. See ANGEL Help for more information.