Here is a list of Open source software that can be used for mobile app developement:
1.Unity- a free game engine for people and companies making less than $100k. Animation, Game production, Coding, and deployment can all be done in here. For 2D and 3D games. www.Unity3d.com/unity
2. Gimp2 - photoshop type program but free. http://www.gimp.org/downloads/
3. Inkscape - a vector image program. http://www.inkscape.org/en/
4. Blender.org - A 3D image, movie, animation, and game engine. I use this mostly for animations and modeling. http://www.blender.
5. Audacity- Voice recording software. http://audacity.sourceforge.
6. LMMS- Sound production software. http://lmms.
7. It would also be good to start a free Copy account. This is 15 GB of cloud space to backup projects in case your computer crashes and then you can share the projects with other people who may also be working on your team.https://www.copy.com/home/
Those are the programs that I currently use for my app development.
Here are some things that you would probably like when you start to develop:
1. Good Computer:
These are the current specs my my computer:
Windows 8.1
8 core processor 3.11 GHz
32 GB Ram
nVidia GeForce GT 640 video card
1 TB harddrive
Now other specs can work as well, but this gives you an idea. I have had no issues running the software on this computer.
2. Microphone- I use Blue Mic Snowball, 2 condensors, and it records well, but any computer microphone could be used. I have recorded sounds with my ipad Mini.
3. keyboard with MIDI Input/Output with MIDI to usb adapter will work too with software.
4. Keyboard with number pad. The number pad is very import for blender
5. 3 button mouse(wheel is usually the third button). This is critical in blender as well.
6. Monitors- I have three Monitors. It really helps with testing and development, but you can get by with one. Once you start using more, you will see why I love having multiple monitors. It allows production to go faster, i.e. I have coding on one screen, asset placement on another and the actual game testing on the third.
Other hardware that I do not have, but would get once the business grows:
7. Render Farm- This is a series of PC boards linked with CPU, RAM and shared hard drives. It allows multiple images to be processed at once. This is very good for animated movie production. These can be as expensive as you would like them to be.
8.Drawing pad. This will help with the modeling and texture creation. You can get apps on ipad or android that have same functionality, but a pressure sensitive pen is also critical.
There are some other good gaming engines and programs out there. The only other one that I will mention to you is the Unreal engine. This engine does not transfer to all the mobile devices, but is a very beautiful game engine. There is a fee to use it, but I am keeping an eye on it, as I may change over to that engine as they open up to more devices. Right now it only works on higher end devices, but the fee is $20 a month and %5 royalty on sales, but is the complete game engine, where unity free has limitations with it. I can go over all those with you another day if you would like, but for now, Unity is easy to use and learn. I would start with the following links and tutorials. You can see how easily you can make a game.
This is a simple roll-a-ball set of tutorials:
This is to help with scripting if you are very new to programming and will go over programming basics:
I do have some youtube tutorials that you can watch on blender. The tutorials are okay and teach some of the more basic things in blender. I need to make some more, but I have not had time. www.youtube.com/channel/
I hope that this helps. I have not worked so long hours in my life since I started doing this, but I am excited everyday to work on the projects I do.
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