The best low cost game development tools

gamedeveloper.com:

Whether you've been making games for decades or just started today, game development does not need to be prohibitively expensive. We're following up with our best free resources list with a supplement here of lower-cost game engines that give their users significant bang for their buck.

I picked a somewhat arbitrary price of $50 USD as the limit here, and have prioritized tools that appear to have good documentation, support, and/or community resources to help new users get situated and cooking with their new software.

PICO-8 is a tiny game engine designed to be a "fantasy console" where users can share entire games (and their code) across small .PNG files. It offers a full development suite (for small projects), encompassing a pixel art editor, level editor, sound/music editor, and script editor, all centered around the idea that users can "Create a whole game or program in one sitting without needing to leave the cozy development environment!" and then share with everyone else in the community with great ease.

PICO-8 runs around $15 USD, and the tool sports a strong community and a wealth of resources: one of which is the ability to swap and look at the code in any Pico-8 "cartridge" shared within the community. Games can also easily be shared in browser, making it an ideal toolset for making small games and releasing them on platforms like itch.io.

The tool works on PC, Mac, Linux and Raspberry Pi.

We also want to include a mention of PICO-8's sister tool, Voxatron (also approximately $20) here, which operates on a similar "fantasy console" framing, but for low-poly 3D games.

RPG Maker is a long-running tool with several main flavors, but two we'd like to highlight here: RPG Maker XP ($25) and RPG Maker 2003 ($20). Both