Does anyone know of a good FREE program that I could download to make a little game?Hi, I know nothing about it but my son has experience in game programming, so here is his reply to you:

Well, it depends upon how much experience you have in programming and with what languages, and also what kind of game you wish to make.

For beginners, a great program to make games is "Open Legends". It is a program for making snes (Super Nintendo) Zelda type games. It uses "small" as a programming language, but you don't even need to USE that if you are making a very basic game. The website is:

http://openlegends.sourceforge.net/


A more advanced program that uses it's own language is "Game Maker 6.1". I never really liked this program, but it has some interesting features such as a particle system and the ability to make games similar to "Wolfenstein 3D". There are two versions, the free one is good, but if you want to GET some of the more fancy features, you'll have to pay The website is:

http://www.gamemaker.nl/


But the most advanced game making tool, which can also be used for other THINGS such as 3D art and movies, and my personal favourite, is "Blender 3D". It can do heaps of things, and it's potential is huge. And it just so happens to be completely free . If you do want to make good 3D games, you will need to use the Python language. But, it is definately worth all effort. The website is:

http://blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html


If you want to get back to raw code, Python, in conjunction with Pygame, is pretty good. Not good for beginners, but it will let you make a game that is completely to your LIKING. It is highly recommended that you get someone with experience with at least Python (even better if they have experience with pygame), as the learning curve can be quite steep, and will take a fair while to get good at it. The website is:

http://www.python.org/

And for pygame it is:

http://www.pygame.org/news.html


I hope all of this helps, I recommend you start with Open Legends if you have little or no experience.That's an IMPRESSIVE collection of free game makers. KJD, tell your son I'm impressed. I say VB or Flash is fairly easy if you know it, but what you just said are worth knowing and i never heard of python language before--------------------cool----------------------