I use a slew of different programs, depending on what I'm going for.

Blender 3D I use for a lot of quickly blocking things out. Being able to move around a 3D scene to see how something looks is great.

• I can also use it, by importing cut up PNGs, to create animations

Inkscape is my illustration software of choice. It's great. I've used Illustrator, but it's not really worth the $$ to be honest.

I only use Gimp sometimes. It's powerful, but feels weird, especially coming from Photoshopland.

And .. I use Krita. http://krita.org It's a paint program , but you can do a lot with it such as tiled painting. IT's great for environments and textures and such.

A lot of the big 3D engines are more indie friendly these days.

Unity3D is pretty awesome and easy to jump into, however unless you have the $1500 to shell out a license there are things you can't do without such as realtime lighting, AA, DoF.

UDK (Unity Dev Kit) is full featured SDK that does a lot, free to use and you only pay a percent if you make over $250k (or .. $25k .. ) which is fairly reasonable. Basically, you only pay for it if you make any money. On the flip side, it's not as easy to figure out as Unity3D. It would take some time and going through a lot of tutorials before you figure it out.

If you've never used a 3D engine before, you're going to be confused pretty quick. BUT once you get the basics it's pretty exciting.

I would also recommend Blender for your modeling needs. You CAN make games in Blender as well, but it's not as robust or easy to use as Unity or UDK.

Hello and salutations.

I'm a 3_ year old goof, three boys and a lovely wife. I've been gaming for years and love geeking out over some new whatnots. I'm a designer, developer, writer and overall just like a good story.

Scirra certainly has hit home for me with Construct. I used other SDK and have a game in the Apple market (Circus Big Pop Lite) using Corona SDK. ONce I started playing with Construct, the gloves came off.

I love imagining. My kids are extremely excited about what we're going to do with this (well, my two older boys .. the baby just likes to keyboard mash). My oldest boy (7) is even starting to create his own little games in Blender and wants to get into Construct as well.

I'm excited about where this is going and can't wait to produce my first games with Construct!