What do people use/can people recommend on this front? Looking for things that are free to download and super easy that I might be able to get students to have a play around with.
Unity or game maker studio free options are excellent
Is unity really easy to use? I'd assumed it'd be way too big a learning curve for beginners...
You have a point, I assumed a little ability to code.
Game maker is nice since you can do a lot just with dragging and dropping things
Yeah, that's high on my list to look into for this. I'm very much wanting the most basic thing you can conceivably build an RPG in, essentially.
I think that game maker or rpg maker will be your friends for that, then :)
It looks like both of those now have time limited rather than just cut-down trial versions. This is very much rubbish for my purposes :(