A Collection of Niche/Obscure Video Game Engine/Makers for people and game developers of culture.
Russian VN RPG Maker
Make a classic Boomer Shooter with this!
Remember Hypercard for the Machintosh in a 90s computer lab?
Welcome back!
Retro CRPG maker. Does cost money and require a annual license for commercial use.
UPDATE: READ THE FINE PRINT! LOL! IT'S COMPLEX BUT LEGIT READ IT! Anyway, you are good! Can't wait! Very much like when Stuart Smith made an RPG Maker for EA(Yes! EA had an RPG Maker called Adventure Construction Set, we were a civilization at one time!)
Batchy Interactive Fiction Game Maker!
Visual Novel Engine for making Visual Novels for the Commodore 64, Atari PC, etc.
I think this lets you combine a bunch of HTML engines like Bitsy, Twine, and videotome into one or something.
RPG maker for making Isometric CRPGs like Diablo and Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. It's free and the developers are like "If you aren't a fan of this game engine but like my pre-made assets, I am okay with you exporting the pre-made assets from my engine for use in other game makers and engines".
Bitsy...But in 3D!
Includes a First Person Camera option for dungeon crawler type games.
Retro Online PHP Web Game Engine.
Like you use it to make browser based online roleplaying games know as PHPBBGs. Most of these old school retro browser games were more strategy, mafia, or virtual pet games. That era was unique because I didn't have good download speeds as a kid and a 1GB MMO legit took 2 to 4 hours to download while it now takes 5 minutes as an adult to download nowadays.
Visual Novel engine for Sega Genesis! Which is funny since I feel Visual Novels were confirmed to be a NintenDO more for the SNES than the Sega Genesis except for maybe the Phantasy Star Interactive Fiction games(The Sega Genesis hardware was more for action based games than the SNES. Which is why the SNES had a bunch of JRPGs and a few Visual Novels(Such as a few entries in the Chunsoft sound novel franchise, a port of the Tokimeki Memorial Dating Sim, and Sound Novel Tsukuru or Maker(Which was a visual novel maker for the SNES) all the VNs were more Japan only though).
With that fact, you can make your own VNs for the Genesis now!
Going to try this visual novel maker out as it's super easy to make games with like RPG Maker yet super advanced.
So it looks like RPG Maker for Visual Novels and Dating Sims.
A tool for making Twine Style Choose Your Own Adventure Games to be ported for the ZX Spectrum! Is in English, Spanish, and Portuguese!
UPDATE: I thought the engine was broken on my emulator for some reason as I couldn't select the choice from my simple text. But I figured out the problem. In the Speccy Emulator, enabling "Capshift + Cursor" in input makes the controls finally work!
It's a Voxel RPG Maker! Yes! A Voxel RPG Maker! For making 3D Voxel RPG Games. Features a lot of options built in for battle systems, model maker, etc. Almost everything you need to make a 3D Voxel JRPG is hopefully in here.
Old School Windows XP era Interactive Fiction maker.
A game engine for making Souplikes, which are walking simulators that feel very similar to the classic PSX game LSD but are more limited scale of being inside of a box with a billboard image in the middle! So more for artsy rooms than anything.
By the creator of the other videotome visual novel engine comes a more advanced version for making "real" Dating Sims like Tokimeki Memorial.
An award winning Interactive fiction engine for creating classic text adventures that run like Zork but with clickable menus.
No page or chapter based clickable text adventures like what Twine makes, now room based clickable text adventures.
Make an Atari 2600 game from "scratch" with little programming!
UPDATE: Made two games with this.
Gamebook maker? Sound novel Maker? I'll check it out!
Hacker Text Adventure Engine?
Still putting this in the niche section despite McDonald's officially using it!
Because making a game boy game easily for free is legit cool!