Tools I use for game development // Best free game development software

What tools are needed for game development? What are the best free game development software? In this video I will show what are the tools I use for game development and how I use them.

⚔️ Mortal Glory 2: https://store.steampowered.com/app/22...
⚔️ Chambers of Devious Design: https://store.steampowered.com/app/16...
⚔️ Mortal Glory: https://store.steampowered.com/app/10...
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0:00 Intro
0:48 Game engine

This is the most important tool you will need and you should pick one of the existing popular ones. As a beginner I think you should pick Unity, which comes with a free version of Visual Studio for editing code. There are a lot of other game engines you can also choose from like Unreal Studio or Godot.

1:22 Game data

You might not want to store all of your data in Unity. For example numerical data that you are likely to change often can be bothersome to store within Unity. For this purpose, I use Excel. In Mortal Glory I use Excel to store all the skill, perk, buff, event, name and localization data. This way it's much easier to adjust quickly. You can also use Google Sheets for this purpose, but it requires a bit more effort as the master version of the data will then be stored in cloud.

1:54 Graphics / Art

Whether or not you will do the art yourself, you will need graphics tools. Especially so if you are a solo indie game developer. For light editing like resizing, adjusting colors or editing pixel art I use Paint.NET. It's very simple and efficient program for this purpose. You can also expand it's functionality with free plugins. If you want to be a bit more professional about your pixel art, you might want to try out Aseprite.

For vector art I use Inkscape. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it's a great free alternative to Adobe Illustrator. You should do all your logos and promo materials with vector art. This way you will be able to resize them as needed without losing any quality.

For more demanding raster editing I use GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). Whenever Paint.NET is not enough, I open GIMP. Like Inkscape, it also has a bit of a learning curve, but you will learn the basics quite fast. If you are into coding, you can create scripts to automate or expand the editing capabilities of GIMP. The most popular paid alternative for GIMP would be Adobe Photoshop.

If you are making a 3D game, you will also want a 3D modeling program like Blender or Maya.

4:17 Audio

If you are not making your own music, you can easily get by with just Audacity. It will give you all the basic audio editing capabilities you will need for game development.

4:39 Workflow

I mainly use Trello. It's great for visualizing your tasks so you will be able to categorize and prioritize your work. As a supplementary tool for Trello, I also use Notepad. Yes, the basic Notepad. Sometimes you just want to store a few sentences with minimal effort.

5:15 Planning

I use Google Docs for hosting my roadmap and collecting my ideas. I am not constantly looking at the roadmap, but it's nice to remind yourself of it now and then. Having your ideas in Google Docs is very handy because then you can reach them anywhere with any device.

5:36 Time management

I created a simple Python script for this. It enables me to track the hours I use for game development with a commitment of just few seconds per day. With basic Python knowledge you will be able to create this script in 10 minutes. It basically just writes letters and numbers into a csv file with the current date. Having data of your spent hours can be used for many purposes, for example finding time usage bottlenecks, calculating your hourly "wage" and improving your estimation skills.

6:07 Gifs

I use EZGIF (ezgif.com) to convert video files to gifs. It's very handy and easy to use! After converting you can also edit the gif files to your liking. I constantly use this for creating marketing material.

6:26 About choosing tools

When it comes to choosing programs for game development, I prefer them to be as simple to use as possible. This way you are not wasting so much time learning how to use the program or getting confused with all the additional functionality you won't need. The best game development tools are usually also the most popular as they have been vetted by others. As an indie dev, you likely are not made of money and want your indie dev tools to be free. Luckily, most of the free tools are good enough for their purpose so there's no shame in using free programs for professional game development. I also like to avoid switching tools if not needed. This again is about saving your time for something more valuable.