The Tools I Use for Indie Game Dev in 2024

hey everyone thanks for joining me for this walkthrough of the tools I'm using for indie game development as we kick off 2024 I made a similar video about 3 years ago and as you can imagine a lot has changed since then so I'm excited to walk you through my new setup just as before we'll run through both the software and some pieces of Hardware that I've been using consistently as part of my daily Game Dev workflow and of course it's important to note that none of the choices I've made here are absolutely required to make games for almost all these tools you could spend way less sometimes even nothing to make a game far more technically demanding than what you see me working on on this channel instead I'd just like this to be a resource if you're looking to fill a gap somewhere in your workflow or are looking to make a fun change in the new year with that said let's jump right into the software beginning of course with my game engine of choice the gdau engine it's somehow already been more than 3 years now since I converted the initial 6 months of progress on my current project from Unity to gdau and I'm happy to say I've never regretted that decision since making that change I've I've written more than 10,000 lines of GD script building a ton of experience with the engine along the way I've also gone through conversions of this huge project to new major versions of gdau and ultimately I've made significant progress building out my massively scoped dream RPG that I'm very proud of now I could and probably should make an entire video on why gdau has ended up being a great fit for me but for the purposes of this video I'll just try to come up with a few of the most important reasons that I think gdau has stuck for my workflow first and foremost of course is that the engine is open sourced with an MIT license there are a lot of great things to unpack about this but something important to me here is that the engine is entirely 100% free to use and I Own 100% of what I build with it no Revenue sharing or strings attached the engine itself is also incredibly lightweight I actually just went and redownloaded the most recent version to see what size it was took less than a minute to download and came in at just over 220 mbes this is a STK contrast to my most recent experience with unity which granted was about 3 years ago but that felt like I was downloading a whole new copy of the engine for every minor version that came out which seemed weekly at that point and the last thing I'll mention for now is that I've always been very happy with the development velocity I've been able to achieve with gdau I realize this is probably something that just comes with time and experience with any engine but there are a lot of things about gdau that just make sense to me and help me turn my ideas into features very efficiently things like GD script being a concise and easy to learn scripting language and gdo seem and node Paradigm and how it pushes you to embrace composition over inheritance and effective patterns like calling down and signaling up all these things seem to come together in a way for me that lets me dream up the next big feature that I want to build and very quickly be able to understand how I want to approach architecting that feature and get started right away with development when it comes to actually writing the code for my games I find myself most frequently using the editor built right into the gdau engine and there are things I like about this and things I don't I think if you want to have the best integrated functionality with the engine itself as your coding the built-in editor is definitely the way to go intence has never been a great experience for me with gdau but I seem to get the most out of it in the editor I also really like support for little things like dragging a node from the scene tree into a script and having its path populated for me and I suppose as a side node not really related to the software itself because I have one large 48 in display here with no curve I prefer to have the content I'm focusing on which is most often the code in the center of my screen rather than having the engine and editor side by side that said this approach does have some downfalls for whatever reason my brain just really can't resolve the fact that scenes live in tabs on the top of the editor and scripts live in this vertical tab on the side so I don't get a whole lot of use out of that the editor here is also just not as fully featured and easily customizable as others you may be used to you won't find things like built-in Source control support browsable themes or oneclick toggling for Vim keybinds in addition if you're ever moving files around in a big project and need to edit the source of a corrupted scene which does definitely happen you won't be able to do that from within the editor for all those things I always have trusty VSS code on the side mostly to edit those tscn files when needed and try to teach myself Vim motions now since I mentioned the large monitor I use on my desk I think it's only right to shout out the window manager tool that I use given how essential it is to making effective use of all this space on Mac I use an app called better snap tool and on Windows I use the fancy zones feature of Microsoft power toys in a vast sea of window management tools these stand out to me because they allow me to lay out custom snap zones on this giant monitor meaning that I can use every inch of this 48 in 4k display exactly how I want without settling for just having this space split into two or four default regions better snap tool is worth every penny of $3 on the App Store and power toys is free on Windows [Music] next up we have my planning tool of choice which for years now has of course been notion both for everything related to my software projects and everything I do for this channel now I try to keep sponsorships on this channel to a minimum but whenever notion is willing to partner I'm always game because it is a service that I have so consistently relied upon and can genuinely recommend you at least consider giving a try based on my experience with the tool so I'm happy to say notion did sponsor this upcoming segment but what we'll be talking about is my genuine experience with the tool so thanks notion for supporting the channel if you've never heard of notion before the best way I could probably describe it is as a database driven organization and productivity tool it's not only very easy to populate notion with information about your goals projects school and anything else but it's also very easy to visualize all of that data in very helpful ways by creating all types of different customizable views that describe that data now I don't want to make this a notion tutorial but I do want to describe how I use it for game development back in the middle of last year 2023 I think is when they released notion projects which is essentially a streamlined collection of templates to help you manage projects and their Associated tasks and subtasks and when this was released I pretty much reset up everything I had for my main game project to take advantage of this new system the results has been really nice to work with under the hood My Dolphin project is just a big database of tasks and subtasks with Associated descriptions C some tags and Status trackers from this information I've created this really nice looking homepage that has a bunch of really helpful views I can see my Global backlog filter on what I'm currently working on and track the status of tasks that are tagged as defects or just ideas to explore further in these views down below when I sit down and get to work I just open up the page associated with my in progress task and pick up right where I left off I also have something very similar in place for tracking all of my video projects which conveniently is where I've prepared all the information I needed for this video you're watching right now now notion has come up with some really cool new stuff since their launch of projects last year one of the most interesting in my opinion is notion Ai and notion Q&A notion AI is an AI assistant that lives right within the notion app that you can kind of sprinkle in to help you with small tasks for example it can summarize insights from a large body of research or if you've written out a description of all the functionality you want for a certain feature in a game it can create a list of tasks or action items for you one of the coolest ways I've actually used this in my project is asking it to brainstorm ideas for a feature I'm working on as an example the questing feature in dolin is something I've yet to build and something I need to do a lot of ideation on if I don't happen to have any creative juices flowing at 6:00 a.m. when I sit down to work on this I can have notion AI brainstorm ideas on building a questing system for an RPG and you can look at all the ideas it spits out here I think this is such an interesting feature and one of the things I like about its implementation is that your data is not used to train any AI models without your consent by default notion Q&A kind of Builds on notion AI letting you ask questions about data that's already in your own repository so I could ask it something like how many days do I have left to finish my tools I use for Indie Game Dev video it'll sweep through my notebook and figure out the answer as my dolin project continues to grow over time I anticipate using this feature more and more to dig up information about content I'm taking notes on now and plan to introduce to the game later overall if you're looking for a new way to manage all the data and documents and tasks related to your game projects I would recommend giving notion a try it's free to use if you're an individual and I'll be sure to leave a link down in the description below next up is artwork if you're a fan of the channel already it should be no surprise that pixel art is kind of my jam and has been my primary art style for every game project I've released so far my go-to tool for pixel art is the ever popular aprite now I'm not the person to be teaching you about aprite as I probably only use about 5% of the features it offers and I'm trying to learn more each time I boot it up but I will say that despite its complex capability I have found it to still be a great tool as a relative beginner to pixel art all the core functionality I need is presented to me right in the default interface without me needing to configure anything to get started from the pallet to the easy to understand layer and frame system and various tools including little nice to haves like helpers for drawing Pixel Perfect lines aprite has been a great companion as I've improved my pixel art capability and created some art that I'm actually quite proud of I personally purchased aprite on Steam for $20 which has been a very worthwhile investment for me but if that's not an option for you or you just want to try it out you can either download a trial version of the app or build the app from its source on GitHub yourself you'll just miss out on getting updates delivered to you if you do that software in the category of music and sound is a bit weird for me as it is by far the area of my game development Journey where I'm furthest behind I really only have a handful of sound effects in place for dolphin and have very roughly composed two pieces of music for Dolphin soundtrack but to complete those jobs I've relied on two different pieces of software for sound effects I've always found myself falling back to audacity mainly because it's lightweight pretty quick to understand without too much bloat in the interface and of course it's free it has not failed me yet when it comes to importing a simple audio file trimming it up and applying some basic effects for music composition I chose to make the $200 investment in logic pro for my Mac and although I still need to spend a ton of time learning how to use it I've been happy with what I've accomplished with it so far the only other tool I really tried in this space was Reaper and I just found that logic gave me more as a total beginner to digital audio workstations things like being able to configure a drummer to lay out a basic percussion track for me and the vast library of instruments that I just get right out of the box now if that sounded to you like the recommendation of someone who has no idea what they're talking about that's probably exactly what it was my real recommendation here would be to try out all the big digital audio workstations and see which one works best for you if you're on a Mac like I am I always recommend just starting with Garage Band which is really just a pair down version of logic pro that's what I started with for my previous two games and of course like most of the other tools I've mentioned it's completely free and comes installed on your Mac so that's going to wrap up the core pieces of software that I use for all the game development you see on this channel if you're keeping track at home this particular toolkit cost me a total of $220 with no attached subscription ions if you were to compile a Sprite yourself and use a free digital audio workstation like GarageBand this toolkit would cost you nothing now before we wrap things up I want to quickly talk about the two pieces of hardware on my desk that truly are essential for my Game Dev work the first of these is of course the machine itself that I use to develop games this is a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM now many of you will probably ask why Mac and that's a reasonable question the simple answer for me is that I'm primar an iOS Developer by trade so I spend a lot of time in this ecosystem I'm very comfortable with it and by using a Mac I get the bonus flexibility to export my projects for Mac OS and iOS on top of that these Apple silicon Macs are extremely performant especially when you compare them to the old Intel Max which I also owned and used extensively for work now I obviously mostly work on 2D pixel art games here but whether I'm doing Game Dev or exporting one of these videos I have never heard the fan spin up on this machine everything I do on here is fast and and because it's somehow just a laptop when I travel or want to work away from my desk I'm not sacrificing any of that power you can call me a fanboy and you're probably right but I do think Apple has achieved something very special with their M series chips in these laptops now all this unfortunately comes with an asterisk because this big fella back here cost me a whopping $3500 which is a ton of money I do feel very confident saying that if you wanted to create a 2D pixel art RPG like dolphin and use pretty much every tool I've already talked about in the this video with the exception of Mac specifics like logic or Garage Band you could absolutely do so with a lot of success with a much more Affordable Windows or Linux laptop probably coming in around $500 to wrap things up and as our last piece of quote unquote Hardware I want to give a shout out to one of my favorite little tools for gamedev which is a notebook in a shoe box somewhere I have a bunch of mol skin notebooks all filled up with daily logs of what I want to accomplish in my game at work and in my personal life at the start of this year I picked up one of these traveler's notebooks which is really just a leather cover that can bind various types of notebook inserts I'm really digging my setup so far which is a bullet Journal style weekly planner insert paired with a simple do grid notebook insert I use the planner as a daily bullet Journal as I have before and the dot grid notebook for brainstorming for Dolphin now obviously I could capture all this stuff in notion or a similar tool but I have always just like having something that I can do away from the computer since that's where I spend so much of my time already and that's exactly why I love keeping a little notebook like this all right I hope you found this list useful and maybe learned about a new tool you hadn't heard about before that could be a great addition to your workflow I'm certainly happy with my setup but I always enjoy trying new things so leave me a comment if you have a favorite tool that I've skipped here as always thanks so much for watching and I hope everyone has a wonderful year of Game Dev in 2024

Channel: DevDuck

Views: 87,047

Keywords: Tools for indie game dev, best engine for indie game dev, notion for game development, godot indie game dev, best tools for indie game dev, devduck, dauphin

Id: B8q1BCHoZcE

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024