Tools I Use On My PC for Game Development
During the course of my day, I work over 8 hours on my computer. Over the last few years I’ve learned of a few tools both online and local that I use frequently that help me to better use my computer. Many of these are specific to game development, but some of these are very useful outside of that context as well. Here are all of the tools I like to use for game development.
Engines
I almost didn’t even mention it, as it seems obvious. But maybe it’s not. Even if it is, I find it interesting to know what Engines people use for game development.
Mostly I use Unity. However, as of late, I’ve been using Unreal more and more. I have dabled in Game Maker Studio 2 and would like to use it more, I made a single project in Construct 3, and I would love to learn Godot.
Everything
If there was one program or technique you get out of this post, it should be Everything. I literally use this multiple times every single day. This package is very simple, it just searches your computer for files or folders that you search for. It allows some Regex, meaning I can simply do *.jpg and find all jpgs on my system. If I know the name of a file, it can find it instantly. The speed at this program operates from it’s cached indexes is incredible. This is the most useful program I’ve downloaded in a long time.
Chocolatey
This tool allows you to very quickly and easily download and update packages. If you are familiar with Linux it is the apt install equivalent, or similar to Homebrew for Max OSX. Chocolatey is still fairly new and gaining ground still, but it has most of the common applications I need ready to go. It makes setting up new computers very simple as I don’t have to navigate to 20 different websites to get libre-office, ScreenToGif, Git, Visual Studio, Firefox, Unity Hub, Spotify, MalwareBytes, etc. It also allows me to very easily update and uninstall any programs whenever I need. I find myself constantly using this to install and manage packages and have mostly had a good time with it.
Command Line
The Windows command line was quite forein to me for a long while. It wasn’t until I started watching Handmade Hero that I really started delving in and learning more about the Windows command line. Specifically I have found two major uses of the command line. Subst, and .bat scripts
Subst, is a command that allows you to create a fake hard drive, or a “virtual drive.” This basically allows you to easily make a quick shortcut reference to a folder. This allows me to work on projects, or groups of projects more easily as I can swap between things and more easily get to folders when booting up, or trying to use git from the command line.
Along with this are batch files, or .bat files. I use them all the time now to do simple tasks on my computer. I learned computer science using bash scripts (.sh files) and never understood the windows command line system very well. While it is worse than bash, you can still do amazing things with batch files, very quickly and easily. While the syntax is hard for me to nail down, I can now make scripts to set environment variables, subst drives, start projects, start an ssh connection, compile code, etc. These are a useful tool to put in the belt.
Git
You NEED to be using some kind of source control. No I don’t think Google Drive counts. I would personally recommend git. I’ve liked it the most out of any I have used, although I seem to dislike it, many of my friends and colleges use Plastic. I don’t think you should use Unity Cloud and I’ll just leave it at that.
If you’re not familiar, source control, or SCM (Source Control Management), software gives you a way to store your projects online and share them with others working on it. It provides tools to try new things, undo your changes and even merge together two changes to the same thing. It’s highly useful and should be required learning for any game dev to make sure you don’t lose all your progress if your PC crashes!
Treesize Free
This is a simple little program that just quickly and simply breaks down where you are using up all your storage space. I’m constantly at battle for more storage, even with my 1 TB SSD and 2, 2 TB HHDs (thanks Unreal…).
This provides an easy way to see what’s taking so much space so I can more efficiently delete things I don’t need.
Windows Subsystem For Linux
Another huge game changer for me personally. If you’re someone who doesn’t use command line or shell scripting, this may not be for you. However, if you DO do those things, I find it super useful to enact Linux commands on my Windows machine.
I’m not sure how you learned to use the terminal, but I for one learned on Linux, and find it much more intuitive and useful compared to that of Windows’s command line. I also have the HARDEST time running Python on windows, so doing it in the WSFL is perfect!
Bookmarks, bookmarks toolbar.
Now I use FireFox, but a bookmarks toolbar works the same on any browser I’ve ever seen. The thing is, you have to use it! It took me the longest time to learn how to use it properly for me, and that’s with LOTS of folders. My “GameDevelopment” folder splits into: “Platforms”, “Engines”, “Generic Programming”, “Design”, “Tech-Art”, and “Legal”. From there, Platforms for instance includes folders for: “Xbox”, “Playstation”, “Nintendo”, “Android”, and “Apple”. This allows me to really quickly jump to any documentation on the Nintendo Website that pertains to any specific guidelines when launching on Switch. When looking for engine specific content, between Unreal, Unity, Game Maker, and Godot, I can easily jump to my Engines folder, the subfolder, and then explore the even further folder subdivisions.
Keeping this organized folder structure allows me to sync tooltips between computers and mobile, as well as clean up and close more tabs. If I have something saved, I don’t need to keep it open anymore!
HacknPlan
This is a Project Management platform that runs in your browser. It’s similar to Trello if you ever used that, the only difference here is that HacknPlan is build specifically for games. This means that there is tons of out-of-the-box features, categories, tags, etc that are built around game development. Ever since I’ve used it, i have yet to find a better tool for me personally. Also worth noting that I’ve never used the paid version.
ScreenToGif
I’m sure this does exactly what you’re expecting… It allows you to record your screen and turn it into a gif. What it also does, is provide an amazing Gif editor to easily delete frames, reduce FPS, save and export in different formats. It’s a really useful program and I’ve yet to use a better gif making software!
