Top 10 Game Development Tools For 2024

Chapters

00:00 Intro
00:35 Team Communication
01:03 Project Management
02:06 Annoying Ad Read
02:57 Concepting
04:11 Game Engine
05:52 Scripting Tool
06:52 2D Art Tool
08:41 3D Art Tool
10:14 3D Painting
11:26 Sound Editing
12:28 Music Composition
13:39 The Ultimate Game Dev Tool!
15:28 Conclusion

[thomasbrush]

Thanks for watching! Hope you learned a ton.

[Zizaco]

It's very interesting to see a "difficulty scale" for each tool. Great list!
Here are some additional recommendations:
- Photopea: It's Photoshop, but for free. It also uses PSD files, so the integrations you mentioned also work with it.
- Libresprite: Aseprite, but free and open-source.
- DaVinci Resolve: Alternative to Adobe Premiere, but free. Movies edited in DaBinciResolve: Alien: Covenant, Avatar, Deadpool 2, Jason Bourne, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, La La Land, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi

[DataPunkStudios]

Blender can do animations, rigging, texture painting, etc, as well and as someone came from maya, it can still perform even at a AAA level. pixel art, I also recommend pyxel edit, especially for painting tilesets in pixel art, and even sprite work. texturing, I agree that substance is good if you want that material based "drag and drop" kind of feel, but if you want a hand painted experience, blender is alright if you get a brush pack and a couple of addons, I also recommend highly for hand painted models is 3dcoat, which is super great as well. Accurig is fairly new and free and its great for getting biped models rigged quickly as well. Just wanted to add to this for any early developers.

[laughinglllama]

Thomas,
I really like playing your games, but I think your greatest skill/talent is making the music. I often listen to the music from your games because it's amazing! I would love it if you could make a video where you talk about how you create music, the software you use, VSTs, samples, and all that stuff. It would be super interesting!

[OrangeAceGaming]

Personally recommend Davinci Resolve. It’s free (industry standard for Hollywood), the workflow is so much smoother and easier than Premier, and it’s great for sound editing as well as video. I’m a part of an up-and-coming narrative podcast, and that’s what our editor uses.
3/10 difficulty for the most part, unless you want to get really fancy with color-grading (which is why it’s Hollywood standard).

[MatthewHarmon]

Really should add version control. Critical even for solo devs.

[FlameOfInsanity]

Personally, I think aseprite itself is a 1-2/10 difficulty. Software itself is relatively easy to learn, it's making the pixel art/animations look good that's the hard part.

[Fuller_Fundamentals]

FL Studio is a bit easier to learn and offers many stock sounds and tools as well. The new version has alot of quality of life changes that makes it more user friendly to beginners because it can be overwhelming at first. You also have more control in my opinion

[nateroo]

For 2D art I'll throw out Clip Studio Paint as a more affordable long term alternative to Photoshop. It's a one time purchase if you don't care about their optional subscription stuff, a lot of the tools from photoshop are there and/or are compatable with it, and it has .psd export options. Krita is also a good free option with only a mildly more intense learning curve. Way better than Gimp imo.

[ss]

11:08 FYI - Substance Painter is also available in Steam as a one time purchase, with some limitations compared to subscription version. And you'll eventually have to buy the next year's version if and when Adobe updates it, as you can keep the software, but you don't get endless free updates.

[Strixkrieg]

For making music, Reaper by far is the best affordable option. It is insanely powerful, and is really cheap. Technically, it can be free because its demo is the full package with guiltware. But it is an amazing DAW. Its only drawback is its UI is very intimidating for beginners to learn, but it uses the same music/sound design rules as any other DAW.

[frankgwarman]

As an Audio Engineer, I would recommend everyone use Reaper for their audio needs. Music or SFX! Easy to learn, highly customizable, and tons of reaources!

Starts as free, and when your trial ends you lose no features and can still use as is. Eventually you will pay for the full license because it is so worth it!

[GarrethDean]

On the texture painting as well. Free to use is quixel mixer. An par with Substance painter but free.
(free last time I checked )

Instead of Premier and/or Final cut, I'd advice Davinci Resolve, it has a completely free version and it already has ALOT of features :D

[hermanusjohannesbesselaar]

Some great recommendations in your video and in the comments. Just want to mention here that I do my art creation in Krita or Gimp ( depending on what I want to do) and they both export to psd format which now smoothly imports to Unity. Used to be that Unity psd importer actually only worked on psb files by default, but a quick extention rename solved this . Unity has since fixed this issue any way. As a one man studio saving on costs is important, so paying a monthly sub for photoshop is not a great option.

[AfzaalAhmadZeeshan]

The support for 2D art tools (Photoshop) is from Unity/Unreal for Photoshop, not the other way around. If it was Photoshop providing support, that'd mean Photoshop being able to read Unity or Unreal projects. This resonates, because Unity and Unreal don't support Gimp so we don't see the support to load the updated assets from those files.

[MoldyGeese]

i love how ive used programs like photoshop, gimp and audacity that are ranked so low in the difficulty scale and i absolutely could not figure them out. Gimp was a nightmare :'>

[Bylov]

You absolutely missed out on Reaper! Not only is it great for game development to replace Audition, but it's an extremely powerful DAW for music as well! It's just incredibly hard to learn, but once you do, it's like C++ - you will be able to create ANYTHING.

[Kennephus]

As a Gimp/Unity user, I'm very satisfied with the workflow. Rather than expect the xcf to work in Unity, I export to png and therefore the xcf is a staging file before the png commit. Once you export to png once, you can re-export to the same png with a single click. Very simple.

[Hietakissa]

Something to keep in mind is that as of Blender 4.0 the automatic FBX export Unity does when directly using the .blend files is broken and throws an error.