What are the best free RPG/FPS makers to use?
If you really want to get involved in a project, take the game-related talents you have and try to get onto a mod team for an existing engine. Valve’s Source engine, written for Half-Life 2, has literally thousands of mods either already released or in production, and that’s only one example. You don’t see nearly as many mods for RPGs, but there are still quite a few hardworking teams out there, but joining in with a mod squad is going to help you a LOT more over the long run with game design. The premade, cut’n’paste utilities like RPGM and DarkBASIC / DarkGDK will eventually prove to have some very serious limitations as you progress. Since nearly all mod teams use original content, with the exception of the engine, you’ll have the same experience of building a game as any team woudl that starts genuinely from the ground-up, except you won’t have to worry about programmers writing an engine for you to work with, and that’s a VERY specfialized job at that. IMO, it’s best to take what
