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.

Some of these no code game engines feature in our best game development software guide, and some are even browser-based so you needn't invest in an expensive laptop for game development (but as you skill improves, you may need one).

Claire Morwood

Solo developer Claire Morwood – who used paper-craft dioramas and claymation to create the beautiful Asterism, as well as making the critically acclaimed Before I Forget with Chella Ramanan – says that one of the best no-code game maker tools for absolute beginners is Bitsy.

“It's web-based, free, easy to use, and gives you creative constraints to work within, as well as providing you with a simple default game that you can begin editing straight away,” she says.

Claire has even written a tutorial for Bitsy, which can be used to make pixel art narrative games in a completely code-free environment, although it does have the option to add some traditional code for advanced purposes. “It's got a great community of game creators on Itch (if you search for the Bitsy tag), and from my experience it can be picked up extremely quickly and by people who have never made games before,” Claire enthuses. “There's also a Bitsy-inspired tool called Bipsi that works well on phones and tablets too.”

Another simple no-code app that Claire recommends is Downpour, which is a phone-based tool for making collage-style games. “Being able to make games on your phone and away from a traditional computer screen gives you a lot of possibilities, such as hand-drawn art and outdoor photography, that lead to a very natural and immediate way of creating,” she says.

Claire is fond of the trend for so-called ‘flatgames’: small, 2D games with very simple controls. “There's a quote from Dreamfeel, who hosted the first flatgame jam back in 2016, that: ‘Flatgames are all about presenting a game as the most raw combination of movement, art and sound’, which I think is so beautiful,” she says. You can make flatgames with tools such as Flatpack or Downpour, but Dreamfeel has also created a Unity plugin called Flatgame Maker. “If you know a small amount of coding, or are able to copy/paste some input detection and basic movement code into a game engine, you could create these in a very low-code way,” Claire says.

Finally, Claire encourages creators to search out and experiment with ‘tiny tools’ for game development wherever possible. “There are a LOT of tools out there, so I'd also like to recommend this list,” she says. “It contains more options than I know about or would be able to go into in detail!”

Timothy FitzRandolph

Indie game creator Timothy FitzRandolph is probably most well-known for the mega-hit mobile titles Where’s My Water? and JellyCar, and last year he launched the Sega Saturn-like Parking Garage Rally to great acclaim. He highlights three no-code tools as being particularly good: Clickteam Fusion, Construct 3 and GDevelop.

“These are all great game creation engines / software that allow making games without having to learn a coding language or text-based coding syntax,” he says. “They all make use of something I like to call ‘event sheets’, which are sort of like a spreadsheet of game rules and actions.” In terms of complexity, event sheets fall somewhere in between the simple blocks of Scratch (a kid-friendly visual programming language) and the ‘connected nodes’ of Unreal Engine’s Blueprints (which we’ll come back to later). “It's a bit more guided and structured than something like Blueprints, but also quite powerful,” Timothy says.

He adds that modern engines like Unity, Godot or Unreal are “a terrible environment for learning the basics of programming” and therefore should be avoided by absolute beginners. “Coding is actually not that difficult, and can be learned by anyone,” he says. “But trying to code within a giant framework like Unity is like learning to cook in the middle of a massive professional kitchen in a hotel or restaurant. I'd prefer to learn cooking in a simple kitchen with just a few tools to learn the basics, and eventually work my way up to the professional kitchen.”

For people looking to learn the basics of coding, he recommends starting with one of the ‘fantasy consoles’, such as the Pico-8 or TIC-80. “They are the equivalent of the tiny kitchen: not very complicated, not too many options, and the code you write is basically the entire game (there isn't some huge ‘engine’ structure surrounding your code), which makes it much easier to understand how things work.”

Dan Marshall

Dan Marshall founded Size Five Games in 2008, and the studio’s titles include the ‘totally accurate football simulator’ Behold the Kickmen and the brilliantly funny point and click adventure / indie platformer hybrid Lair of the Clockwork God.

Dan has frequently used the Unity tool Adventure Creator in the past. “It has a beautiful node-based system for stringing together events,” he says, adding that it makes the creation of point and click adventure games “infinitely quicker” and is a “joy to use”.

“The caveat being, of course, that the second you try to stray outside of what it's very specifically designed to do, you're likely to come a bit of a cropper,” he says, “and you'll have to get your hands dirty with some real code in order to circumnavigate its systems, which complicates and bloats things, and makes everything feel a bit like a big wobbly house of cards. So it's brilliant if you're limiting yourself to the one genre of game and don't fancy tinkering with the boundaries at all.”

In addition, Dan has dabbled with Unity Visual Scripting (formerly known as Bolt), which he says is a “pretty good-and-robust system” for replacing code. “It always feels much slower to me than just typing, though,” he adds. “It's a bit over-fiddly for my tastes.”

He credits the 1990s tools Klik 'n Play and The Games Factory with teaching him the basics of how to code when he was younger. “That's where I cut my teeth, and they were basically the forerunners in codeless coding.” But although he has benefited from various forms of visual scripting, he still swears by typed code, reasoning that although visual scripting can help to lift the burden of coding, it can also be quite limiting. “So my advice with this stuff is probably, sure, go for it, make some cool things, BUT maybe have a little dabble in coding as well once you've got the hang of it.”

Alastair Low

Lowtek Games founder Alastair Low is known for the 8-bit-styled titles Flea! and Tapeworm Disco Puzzle, and recently he has developed an interactive pop-up book that works via light projection. He says he started off by making simple 2D games using The Games Factory 2, adding that the modern equivalents are Clickteam Fusion or Construct 3.

He also thinks that Bitsy and the no-code tool Pulp for the Playdate handheld could be good gateways to game development. However, he worries that they are too basic: “I fear with stuff so simplified, the next generation of game devs will get lost when the more commercial engines don't meet the innovative UI simplicity of Bitsy,” Alastair says. It was something he felt himself in the difficulty of translating his knowledge of Games Factory 2 to more advanced engines.

Like Timothy, he reckons that Unity Visual Scripting and Blueprints are a bit too tricky for people who are just starting out. “They are basically still doing all the steps you would have to in code, but visually,” he says. “It’s useful to see what inputs and outputs each function accepts, and to be able to track them through a node graph, but it can quickly become complex and overwhelming for bigger projects.”

However, he would recommend Stencyl – “a fun 2D engine that I’ve heard described as Scratch on steroids” – as well as the no-code solutions offered by the retro game creation tools NESmaker and GB Studio. “These are good if you want to create a generic genre game,” he says, “but if you want to add a spin on the mechanics, you often need to dive into the code a little to get the results you want. I think the key to a good workflow on this is to allow for both code and visual stuff.”

Alex Goodwin

Alex Goodwin is behind the recently released Selfloss, a game set in a world of Slavic and Icelandic folklore. Alex uses Unreal Engine, which has built-in visual scripting tool called Blueprints, but he warns that it might be off-putting for anyone who doesn’t have prior experience of programming.

“You have to understand that visual programming in a sense is not really that much easier than just programming with typing,” he warns. “All existing visual no-code tools still require very important things to know - core general concepts of programming.” He’s referring to basic principles such as variables and cycles. “You can’t just skip understanding of those and start to program with Blueprints.” Indeed, even though he had years of prior experience with programming languages, Alex says he still found his first few months with Unreal and Blueprints “kinda harsh” and “not as easy to pick up as I believed”.

That said, the core of Blueprints and similar visual scripting tools is fairly simple. “In its essence, 99% of the task you are doing when programming and designing is creating a flowchart of commands that go one by one, a single step at a time.” Visual scripting simply allows you to actually see the flow charts that are buried within the semi-colons and brackets of the code.

“In a way, learning Blueprints or any visual coding actually brings you so, so close to the start of learning some ‘real’ programming languages, like C#, Java, C++, you name it,” Alex concludes. “Based on my teaching experience, I should say that most developers actually struggle more to go from those languages to visual coding than vice versa.”

“Unreal is the most popular engine today, so finding learning resources for newcomers is not a problem, it’s all out there, free and easy to pick up. Just learn the basic ideas behind programming and you are good to go.”