Cave Engine is a simple 3D desktop Game Engine scriptable in Python, therefore offering the perfect opportunity for getting into game development during the Christmas holiday season!

At IProgrammer we are fans of free or open source gamedev engines. Last time we looked into the Open 3D Engine, a full-featured real-time open source 3D engine that can be used to create high-fidelity games and simulations, and Stride3D, an opensource C# game engine for realistic rendering and VR.
Aside from being great game engines, they can also be considered as viable alternatives to professional commercial
engines like Unity as we examined in "Stride3D - Life beyond Unity?" :

given the recent Unity/Iron Source merging that resulted in fallout within the game dev community, prompting it to look for alternatives, maybe it's time for this game engine to pick up the pieces. VVVV Visual Programming Environment has already picked it up as its 3d rendering library of choice. Why don't you too?

The Cave Engine is a new kid on the block from Brazil that targets mainly amateur wanna be game devs by focusing 100% on the usability and your experience using it. By keeping it as simple as possible so even someone with zero experience with game development will be able to use it, at the same time it is powerful enough to support bigger endeavors. For instance games made with Cave have been released to itch. io. As the makers of then engine, Uniday Studio, state:

After so many years, students and answering literally dozens of thousands of questions about the topic, we realized that a lot of people don't make their games because they found too hard to get started or use the software. We reached a conclusion that, just like a joke, if a game engine needs an explanation on how to use it, then this engine may not be that good.

And that's our main principle now;Cave Engine is focused in provide the smallest path between you and your dream games.

As such Cave Engine is ideal if you want to make basically any type of 3D games;First Person, Third Person, Top Down Games, Vehicle/Racing Games, you name it!. It also provides a lot of premade systems to get you started in your projects and an easy to use but complete Game Editor. This makes it a perfect proposition to having fun with your kids during this holiday season!

And while little, this is also yet another gamedev engine that has got all the functionalities you may expect from a Commercial Game Engine:

• Easy Asset Importing Workflow (fbx, blend, obj, dae, . . . )
  
  
• Entity Component based Architecture
  
  
• Fully integrated Python Scripting with fast C++ Backends
  
  
• Python Tooling to extend the Editor and your Workflow
  
  
• Particle and Rendering Systems
  
  
• Bullet Physics to handle all your Physics needs
  
  
• Skeletal Animation, Physically Based Render Pipeline (PBR)

Also, while the Engine and Editor is written in C/C++ and GLSL, it also provides a Python API for scripting to easily infuse programming logic into your games. For instance you can script physics, collision checks, query objects , do Math operations, transform components and so on. There's no need to install Python separately as it comes embedded by default and all the cave modules and submodules lie within the engine. The official documentation is enough to get you started, and there's a showcase of games made with Cave and released to itch. io

The engine while free to use even for commercial applications , is not open source and is property of Uniday Studio who require Attribution - you must give appropriate credit to Uniday Studio and Cave Engine in your game, while the exported Game can not include a copy of the Cave Engine Editor itself. Pretty permissive if you ask me.

As for the platforms you can export your games to, for now only the Windows platform is supported. There are plans to support Linux and Mac in the future, but it's low priority for now. Note that the engine and the editor also run on Windows only.
That's not an obstacle though as most people novice game devs are on Windows anyway.

With that said and to conclude, Cave Engine makes doing games fun! Give it a try.

More Information

Cave Engine

Official Documentation

Related Articles

Open 3D Engine-Next Gen Game Development

Stride3D - Life beyond Unity?

Memorial University's Intro to Game Programming

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