Here’s our big list of tools for making games!
For each tool, we’ll note the following:
This is a living document. Suggest changes, additions, or volunteer as a helper here.
A game engine is your primary tool in video game design. Pretty much any way of telling a computer what to do can be a valid game engine (Rollercoaster tycoon was rather famously written in raw x86 assembly), but the game dev community has come to a consensus that such things are considered “too cool,” so we recommend using a pre-built engine instead of rolling your own.
Godot is a powerful engine, featuring a user friendly python-esque scripting langauage called gdscript, with the option to substitute in C#. Godot supports both 2D and 3D development, and is incredibly lightweight, capable of running on phones, browsers, and native VR headsets alike.
A version control system, or VCS, is designed to keep track of your work history and enable you to work with others in a sane manner. These are very helpful, if not necessary, for video game design, however, we also deem them equally important for other forms of game design as well.
Git is the most used version control system in software. You can find a full newbie friendly guide to the software here
An Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, is usually a text editor of some kind that enables software development. This involves things like syntax highlighting, language servers, text autocompletion, find and replace, and debugging tools, among others. In English, they make writing software not painful.
IDEs will likely be primarily a video game focused tool, however we do want to note that markdown and LaTeX can be rendered into a great PDF.
Open source packaging for Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio Code IDE. A good balance between utility/ support, and not selling your firstborn to Bill Gates.
One of the most widely used and supported IDEs on the market.
A hard fork of the newer Zed IDE, removing bloat and designing for usability and simplicity.
A Digital Audio Workstation is a piece of software designed to help you make music and work with audio.
Also, here’s a quick overview of audio formats. Compression (making the file smaller) is generally standard, as decompression is pretty cheap and audio filesizes get quite large.
One is not better than the other, they should just be used for different things.
Ogg Vorbis (OGG): Open standard, widely supported, lossy audio format. More efficient than mp3, meaning that more data can be stored in the same size, or the same data can be stored in a smaller size.
Opus (OPUS): Open standard, modern, lossy audio format. Supersedes vorbis, with much much lower latency, but not as widely supported.
mp3 (mp3): Proprietary, old, lossy audio format. Works everywhere, but consider ogg or opus if they’re supported.
FLAC (FLAC): Open standard, widely supported, lossless audio format. Works everywhere, pretty much the standard for lossless audio.
WAV (WAV): Proprietary, supported, uncompressed audio format. Please do not the WAV.
Ardour is a fully featured DAW, capable of editing, recording, and mixing audio. It also features midi support for music production.
Comprehending randomness is a difficult prospect for a lot of people, and it’s especially important for TTRPG and physical game design. These tools exist to help you wrap your head around the frequencies of outcomes, so you can focus on crafting random systems that further your design intentions.
Icepool is a python library for randomness. You can use it raw in your own python scripts or use its custom graphical web interface.
You can find its documentation here.
Anydice is a popular tool for randomness in the TTRPG design community. It’s less open and customizable than icepool, but is a bit more user friendly.
2D visual art has many uses in all kinds of game design. Video games are frequently entirely 2D, 3D games need menu icons, UI, textures, and more, and Physical games need 2D art that is representative of their design to set the mood and the fiction. There are many varieties of 2D art whose differences should be noted. We will also list preferred file types.
Vector Art (SVG): Behold, the Holy Grail. Vector art is actually just math and code under the hood, which means that it can be scaled as much as desired, and it will retain perfect definition. Not applicable to everything, and not everything supports it, but should be used where possible.
Pixel Art (PNG): Low-resolution stylized drawings. It’s application is user preference, but largely, we recommend trying it if you’re new to making art and assets, as we find it more accessible than the alternatives.
Traditional/Digital Art (PNG): High-resolution drawings, used for basically everything.
Splendid professional art program with good community support. Supports layering, animation, brush stabilization, and more.
Comprehensive vector graphics (SVG) software.
Open source fork of the popular pixel art program Aseprite before it closed off its license. Less feature rich, but actually open source.
Feature rich pixel art program, featuring powerful tilemap tooling.
Modeling! Sculpting! Animating! Yeah!
I’ll go ahead and link the splendid kenney assets’ guide on file formats and importing here. Go check him out if you haven’t yet!
Very powerful, industry standard tool for 3d modeling, rigging, texturing, rendering, animating, editing, and more.