The best no code game engines recommended by leading indie devs

No code game engines and tools are becoming increasingly popular, enabling artists and anyone with a good idea to create video games without the need for typing thousands of lines of code. Also known as visual coding or visual scripting, these tools typically involve simply dragging and dropping boxes, and recently the hugely successful Citizen Sleeper 2 was created entirely with visual scripting by solo developer Gareth Damian Martin. It’s likely that Gareth’s no-code approach will inspire other artists and creators who perhaps thought game design was beyond their reach.

But with so many no code game maker platforms and apps out there, such as BuildBox, Godot and Construct, where should you start? I asked five indie developers for their recommendations, to discover the visual scripting apps actual game makers are using.

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Lewis Packwood
Video games journalist

Lewis Packwood has been writing about video games professionally since 2013, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Retro Gamer, EDGE, Eurogamer, Wireframe, Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, PC Gamer and Time Extension, among others. He is also the author of Curious Video Game Machines: A Compendium of Rare and Unusual Consoles, Computers and Coin-Ops (White Owl, 2023).

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