Back in March I mentioned that a lot of the big game development engines were relaxing a lot of the licensing fees (becoming free as in "free beer"). That was nice but still not terribly useful for me as an exclusive Linux user. With Android, SteamOS, and other knock-on Linux technologies, bringing games to Linux has very recently become a non-negligible priority in the industry. The problem for me is that until very, very recently, if a game engine had "Linux support" that meant it could create executable games that ran on Linux. That’s wonderful and I’ve supported this with some Steam purchases. (Most gamers don’t take 20 year breaks!) However being able to actually create games in Linux as a development platform using the major engines remained mostly impossible.
I am thrilled to report that this is changing! Today Unity (not to be confused with the painfully stupid desktop environment created for Ubuntu) is announcing that their editor now has a functional Linux build. But this isn’t even the first!
Coincidentally, this past weekend I had just managed to get the editor for the Unreal Game Engine working in Linux. I was able to make and play with a very simple 3d game based on their demos. This is a huge milestone for Linux and for me personally.
With developers free to use a proper OS like Linux for development it’s likely we’ll see a lot more games that actually work well on that platform. And you thought the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race was condescending. Ha! You ain’t seen nothing. This is going to be a lot of fun!
UPDATE: 2017-03-24 - New source of information about this since Unity3d’s main download page only shows Mac and Windows. New link.
UPDATE: 2019-02-15 - Same deal with the main page not listing a Linux editor, but a more persistent search will turn up this forum page which has detailed release information about a Unity editor which definitely does run on Linux. More information will now be tracked in my notes on Unity.