BYOND (free)

[Tami]

BYOND is a free 2D tile-based engine for making and playing online multiplayer games on Windows. It is composed of:

1. Dream Maker
Create your game with Dream Maker, a robust game development environment that includes a code editor, icon/animation/map editors, a compiler, and facilities for packaging your game for release.

2. Dream Daemon
Host your game on the Internet with Dream Daemon, the hosting tool that turns your computer into a server. We also provide Dream Daemon for BSD, Linux and Mac OS X. For testing purposes and simple hosting needs, you can host directly from Dream Seeker, the game client.

3. The Hub
Players find your game through the BYOND Hub, which lists hosted games on the BYOND website and in the BYOND pager.

4. Dream Seeker
Finally, players experience your game through the Dream Seeker client. This is a game engine with built-in chatting and text command capabilities, HTML browser, and sound and graphics support.

What makes BYOND special?
Unlike any other system, BYOND makes it simple to create a multiplayer networked game with no extra coding (really!) while still giving you power and flexibility to make the game you want.

1. Built-in multiplayer

BYOND is built from the ground up as a multiplayer networked engine, with no networking code needed on your part. Not only that, we handle the player accounts, passwords, authentication, and logging in to your game.

2. Subscription support

Want to make money from your game? We provide integrated subscription support that allows you to charge for access to your game, or to provide extra functionality for subscribers. A popular model is to make the base game free, and charge for full access.

3. Thousands of players

BYOND brings the players to you. We have tens of thousands of regular players who love games and who want to try out your latest effort. Our community of players and developers has developed over the years and is our biggest asset. We provide a pager, blog support, forums, and guilds to keep everyone in touch.

4. Make the game YOU want

Some systems just let you drop icons into an existing game and set some script triggers, but BYOND is completely flexible. Our developers have created board games, card games, RPGs, persistent worlds, text MUDs, you name it. Given the graphic model you won't be making a First-Person Shooter with BYOND, but just about anything else goes.

5. Simple yet powerful coding model

We are especially proud of DM, our programming language. Similar to Python in syntax, it supports the cleanest code we've ever seen. It's object-oriented and extremely easy to learn, while providing all the power a professional programmer needs. It's a compiled language with graphics, animation, and sound support built-in.
6. Free

BYOND is and always will be free for developing and playing games. You can buy a cheap BYOND Membership to get some extra frills and to help support the system, but it's completely optional.