Your game development process is lagging behind. What tools can help you catch up?

In most cases, a single process, tool or a person in the wokflow is the culprit. for an example, incorrectly configured message broker that causes lag or an assets import plugin that cause issues in the animations. its vital to single out the culprit before moving on and trying to force things. most of the game development projects fail, even before they start.

Game engines are indispensable tools for developers, providing core functionalities like graphics, physics, and scripting. They streamline development, allowing focus on game logic and design rather than coding from scratch. Popular choices, including Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, GameMaker Studio, and RPG Maker, offer various advantages and cater to diverse preferences in the game development community.

You know what is so great about utilizing an existing game engine? The incredible online community that supports the engine! Plus it frees your team up to focus on the game experience itself. The policy that I adopted during the time my team and I were using Unity, was that if you have a question about the engine, go to the internet to see if there's an answer from the community. If you can't find anything, turn to your peer and ask them. Lastly, if you're still having trouble, ask a tech artist or a dev. By asking artists to do their own research, they would inevitably learn one or two new things on accident! I tried to keep the artists from bothering the engineers which allowed them to focus on their daily tasks. Let's go!

No. Just no. If your game dev process is lagging behind, the idea that you'll just "bring in a new engine" and that will solve it is asinine. Sometimes in game dev you may need to change engines out, but even UPDATING unreal or unity for a live dev project can be a huge blow to your velocity and take a ton of engineers a lot of time. Unless you JUST STARTED, or in very rare circumstances where there's a complete game/engine mismatch, picking up a new game engine to "speed up the game dev process" is far more likely to blow up in your face than help you go faster. If you have to change engines, recognize that will be a huge initial hit to development speed. It may be worth it, but don't be naive and think it'll just speed things up.

Before you start working on your game, it is very important to categorize and choose the tools you will be using. I have categorized them as follows: Game Engine: Popular choices include Unity (for beginners) and Unreal (more advanced). Art Inspiration & Assets: Use Pinterest, Behance, Google Play, and App Store for art inspiration. Unity's Asset Store offers a wide range of free and paid assets (3D/2D). Coding: Opt for VS Code, a versatile IDE with advanced features. Integrate AI where needed for a significant development speed boost. Testing/Debugging: Choose Jira, PlaytestCloud, Unity Profiler, and VS Debugger for effective testing and debugging.

Crafting the essence of a game—characters, environments, animations, sounds, and music—demands diverse skills. Asset creation tools like Blender, Photoshop, Audacity, GIMP, and FL Studio simplify this process, offering efficiency and creative versatility to game developers.

Your artists, engineers, designers, and etc. should certainly be contributing to the conversation of how good their tools are, and what would help them go faster. This is a huge part of being a discipline lead. Usually though, this is less about, "here's a new tool we can use!" and more about "here's how our engineers/tools engineers can improve the workflows we have to make us all better". This is a huge prioritization challenge, but one well worth tackling. So again, don't view this as "here's a tool we could switch to maybe everything will be better". That might be true, but is less common. What you usually find are teams who have tools that need work and don't play with the engine/source control well. Solve that.

High quality assets can be a great way to improve your game, visually or in term of ambiance. However, not getting the best assets you could, should not limit your creativity, there are many ways to have a good looking game : post process, good level design, good use of lighting, etc... But taking in consideration your limitations in assets quality is also a useful skill to learn, so keep that in mind!

The game engine is the stage where your assets will be shown. To make up the game assets you can rely on tools such as Maya, Blender, Photoshop, Topogun etc. Don't forget that you can utilize tools to make your assets small enough to play on multiple platforms, increasing your reach and profitibility! Texture packer, as an example, is a great tool that can organize your asset materials into efficient atlases, allowing your game to be well compressed. UV Layout is another tool that can help your texture artists improve the quality of the UV unwrapping and can help improve the amount of atlas space allocated to your 3D models. Spine is an incredibly efficient 2D animation tool etc. Do your research! Speed up and improve your workflow!

It is important to have consistency in asset creation as it is one of the important piller to make a game more immersive rather than wayward. We can achieve this consistency by using different kind of textures in assets with almost same wavelength of colors and pattern.

In Unity game development, effective coding is facilitated by specialized integrated development environments (IDEs). Notable choices include Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, offering features like code editing, debugging, and project management tailored for seamless Unity development. These IDEs enhance the coding experience, ensuring efficiency and precision in implementing game logic and functionality within the Unity framework.

Visual studio and visual studio code. Best in the market. Easy to use also git hub integration makes it easy to work. Different plugins are there which really helps with development.

Utilizar IDEs as quais tenha familiaridade ou a qual realmente tenha inten??o de adicionar ao currículo. N?o desperdi?ar tempo com inúmeras ferramentas, tente focar nas principais do mercado e aquela que mais o agrade.

In game development, effective coding is essential, and choosing the right tools is crucial. Code editors like Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Atom, and IDEs such as PyCharm offer indispensable features for seamless coding. From project management to debugging, these tools enhance efficiency, ensuring the smooth implementation of game logic and functionality.

When it comes to game dev, your IDE will have the smallest impact on your delivery time overall. Some game engines like GameMaker Studio 2 even have "built-in" IDEs to help simplify the process further. For other game engines such as Unity, the only important factor to consider is compatibility. For example, PyCharm will most likely be a poor fit, since it's primarily aimed as supporting Python, while Visual Studio Code has extensions for both Unity and C#. Other than that, your IDE should have little to no impact on your overall development time.

In game development, version control systems (VCS) such as Git, Subversion, Mercurial, and Perforce are essential for managing code and asset changes. Platforms like GitHub and GitLab further enhance collaboration, providing efficient version tracking and project sharing capabilities for developers in the gaming community.

Yep, these are important. As it relates to speeding up your game dev process though... unless you were using dropbox as your source or something, you probably already had something going here, even just git. Changing this will probably not net you massive gains. But absolutely, when starting out try to pick a good one. Just don't think changing version control halfway through dev when things are taking too long is going to be a silver bullet for speed.

Está iniciando? Compreenda como cada um funciona, entretanto, os recrutadores e equipes geralmente gostam de ver o Github. Sou da época do CVS, depois SNV e atualmente Github mesmo, pela seguran?a e versionamento dos códigos.

Version control systems are indispensable for collaborative game development. Git, Mercurial, and SVN enable teams to track changes, collaborate seamlessly, and revert to previous states if needed. These systems enhance project organization, facilitating efficient collaboration among developers. With features like branching and merging, version control ensures a streamlined and controlled development process, crucial for successful game projects.

Any development that has multiple people contributing needs an effective version control system. Git is most popular right now, SVN, mercurials etc are still being used in some projects. A good VCS will make sure to remind you of any change made from others. It should also allow you to revert changes if necessary. Finally, it shold allow gaetways to prevent authorised changes in important areas. Client/IDE support is also very important. It shold support seamless integration with your IDE.

tools like Unity Debugger and the built-in testing framework provide efficient solutions for debugging and testing. These tools help identify and resolve errors, ensuring improved game quality and performance before release.

Ah, so close to being something that will actually help with the problem of speed! So generally, the longer it takes you to find a bug, the more expensive it is to fix. Therefore, investing in automated testing harnesses and the like is critical, and too often ignored early in dev. If you did that, it may be worthwhile actually going back through and getting smoke tests and other checks set up to run regularly. If you want to really get value, integrate a solid CI/CD system into your dev team that automatically runs tests whenever checks happen, giving you high confidence that changes aren't breaking anything. This is less about tools for QA, and more about unit, integration, and functional tests that warn you when something is wrong.

Debugging and testing are essential components of robust game development. Tools like Unity Debugger, Visual Studio Debugger, and Xcode Instruments help developers identify and fix code problems. Additionally, testing frameworks such as JUnit and XCTest help ensure game functionality and performance. These tools combine to simplify the development process, ensuring the creation of a stable and error-free gaming environment.

Debug pode ser o diferencial na contrata??o. é importante saber debugar o código, economizando um tempo precioso na corre??o de bugs. O Visual Studio oferece toda a base necessária, porém, requer estudo. Debug vai além disso, também há uma vertente toda na cybersecurity, e daí, tu pode pensar em x64dbg ou similares.

Unit tests are important. Get them early on and it will save you a lot of time figuring out bugs later on! Make sure you have test cases defined that you can repeat. They will make sure everything is still working as it should. Your IDE should support code debugging. For specialist debugging e.g., shaders, you might need dedicated tools such as those from NVIDIA, AMD etc. The game engine should also provide some debugging tools

One of the most important thing to consider is : your own mental state. Sleep, good time management and other activities can help reduce stress. Sometimes, when you are struggling the best option is to slow down and take a break. After that you can have a fresh look on your situation/problem and find a new way to overcome your struggles.

If your game dev process is slow, hoping tools will be your salvation is a bad bet. Not saying it won't help, and maybe in some weird edge cases could totally save a project, but in most cases the problem is not solved by swapping out or bringing in a new tool. Instead, if your game dev process is slow focus on what the most valuable work you could be doing is. What's the experience your trying to create? Where are you hoping players become engaged but aren't seeing it? Focus on those things. Don't get caught thinking slow dev is just a technical problem. Yes, it can be a huge contributor, but you aren't solving it midway through dev. Instead, look at what you are prioritizing. You want to do the least work for the most value.

Some tools ... Scope checker Excel sheet for re-assessing remaining effort and hiring needs. Big Kanban board centrally located for tracking game levels or zones with assignees, columns for each stage, and sign offs. Outsourcing pipeline and asset review and processing tools for incorporating outsource art. Code reviewing tools for catching bugs and making code more reusable.

A lot of time can be saved if the initial planning for the game is done correctly. It will help prevent "feature creep" and keep your project limited to its scope. Creating an MVP to play test can also help save time by preventing time being wasted on a project that's bound to flop. Many games that failed didn't have a fun or enjoyable MVP. Instead of focusing development time towards a project that was "doomed to fail" from the start, it would be far better to focus time and resources to project that are more fun and likely to succeed. This is esspecially important when working with a company that has multiple projects lined up!

Loving the feedback here! Go ahead and check out https://Buidbox.ai as well. A lot of game developers are using this to speed up game development for the App Store and Steam.