BYOND

BYOND is a place and a tool at the same time. It’s a place where you can play hundreds of free indie games, and it’s also a tool because, with it, you can build your own titles. It’s not a high-end game engine or a client that provides breathtaking games, but it’s a nice little corner in which you might find some interesting things.

BYOND, the client, features a basic and comprehensive GUI in which you can view a list of the games that are available and information about each one of them. In the left side of the main window you have all the games with indication about how popular they are (how many people are playing them) and in a right side pane you can view detailed information about the active servers, game descriptions and related games.

It’s all straightforward, and you even get a search function and sorting by genre. With BYOND it’s not important whether you have used game clients in the past, the app is easy to use by anyone.

BYOND houses plenty of games to play, both singleplayer and multiplayer titles. However, it supplies games that are really indie, so indie that some of them can might even be addressed as underground games. You get a good deal of variety when it comes to how complex the game is but, in most part, they’re fairly basic.

Some are very well polished, and you’ll generally see that those have a large number of players while some are simpler that Tetris. BYOND is a nice place where you can see what other people are doing as well as what you can do with the development tools that that come with everything else.

The best thing about BYOND is that it’s free. The games are free, and so are the tools offered for development. For someone who’s just starting with game creation, this is a good place to look in for advice and help.