Top 10 Game Development Tools For 2024

how's it going guys we're going to talk really quickly about my top game development tools for 2024 I make games I actually do this for a living I'm on my third commercial release called Twisted tower being published by 3D Realms so I'm going to tell you what me and my team use to make games and what we're going to be using in 2024 be sure to stick around to the end of the video because we're going to talk about the number one tool that I think is going to make or break a game developers career on top of that we're going to discuss Alternatives and also rate each tool 1 to 10 in terms of difficulty to learn one being super easy and 10 being incredibly difficult all right let's start at the very very beginning the first tool that every game developer needs to learn is Discord if you're going to become a better game developer you need to meet other game developers and if you're going to have a team you can communicate on Discord that's what me and my team do an alternative is slack slack isn't that great for gamers so just join Discord in terms of difficulty Discord is a 2 out of 10 it's not a 1 out of 10 like slack because Discord has its own little I don't know idiosyncrasies but it's it's pretty easy to learn all right moving forward now that we've talked about communication how do you manage a project but thas I don't need to manage a project I don't have a team you do you really need to manage a project everybody regardless of if you're paying yourself or you're doing this as a hobby you should be managing your project cuz it can get overwhelming and it's ultimately going to lead you to probably quit your game because you've well not manage the project well so me and my team use clickup clickup is awesome cuz you can assign and create Tas s and create priorities and deadlines you can manage your calendar you can whiteboard ideas with your team or just yourself you can create documentation for your game there's tons of work views you can collaborate it's highly customizable and because it's highly customizable I'm going to give it a three out of 10 to learn still pretty easy and it's free and also there's a paid version an alternative here is monday.com I'm sure you've see the ads from monday.com I think clickup is prettier honestly that's the reason why I choose it I think it's prettier and also monday.com isn't nearly as robust as clickup which makes it a little bit easier to learn two out of 10 to learn before we talk about the next tool I did want to let you know that this video is sponsored by full-time Game Dev which is my massive program I would say it's probably one of the most comprehensive game development courses out there you're going to learn ton of tools including unity and unreal you're going to learn how to make 2D and 3D games and also how to sell those games and make six figures before you even finish them I know that sounds gimmicky but it's true and I've done it three no I've done it four times I've sold my game before I even released it to make a full-time income click the link below 50% off you're going to get 2D and 3D art Pro completely free but only for this Black Friday sale event for the next 14 days all right let's talk about the next tool moving forward concepting notice how we're slowly going up the ladder here and it's funny because a lot of you probably think these tools that I'm mentioning right now are like the least important but actually as a leader of a team and an owner of a video game Studio I actually spend the majority of my time in these three tools that I'm mentioning here so the third one here for concepting is mid journey I know what you're thinking AI art is yeah if you're going to put it in your game directly it it's it's evil but if you're going to use it for concepting I think it's totally fine and me and my team just to get on the same page or to brainstorm or to maybe try and communicate with each other if we're confused about what we're talking about we'll use mid Journeys so for example if I say to my 3D artist Felipe if I say I want it to look like Walt Disney designed a pistol in 1930 he's to think what is Thomas talking about so I'll just go to Mid journey and and get some AI art created and send it to phelipe and say hey use this as inspiration in your 3D art this is a great way to create Concepts and it is probably going to be the future from here on out an alternative is Adobe Firefly I would say Adobe Firefly the artwork isn't nearly as good but you don't have to use text only prompts so a good way to think of it as mid Journeys like using command prompt and Adobe firefli is like using an actual piece of software with buttons to click so in terms of difficulty mid Journey would be a 4 out of 10 it's kind of weird getting used to the text prompts and using it on Discord Adobe Firefly 1 out of 10 super easy to to learn all right moving on to actual game development you can use Unity or you can use unreal there's also gdau which is open source so I'm going to give you three options for development there's plenty other ones I'm just going to quickly break down the issues with each one pros and cons Unity obviously guys the leadership recently has really screwed up because they changed the pricing structure to something asinine and then they sort of walked it back so far the software itself is great it's the leadership and the pricing structure that's definitely been screwed with and I'm hoping and praying that Unity sticks with their current pricing structure because it's actually better than unreal now with unity which is what me and my team use and we we make 2D games and 3D games with unity it's honestly it's I think the most intuitive and the easiest to learn it's cross platform it's versatile now obviously unreal is crossplatform as well but Unity it's just got a lot more platforms and also the documentation and the sdks to work with other platforms like Xbox and Playstation it's it's much easier to work with it's it's very robust documentation and the community with unity is incredible again leadership sucks but the community is great with unity so difficulty for Unity 5 out of 10 difficulty for unreal I'm going to give it a 7 out of 10 I've heard gdau is easy to learn so we're probably going to give it a 5 out of 10 just like Unity gdau is open source and I would say that yes it is incredible but it's not fully realized just yet and the community because it's open source the community is going to have to make that happen and I believe in it I really do I believe that gdau is going to become an incredible tool pretty quickly here number five coding okay pretty straightforward here I just use Visual Studio there's also an alternative called Rider in terms of difficulty they're both incredibly difficult not because of the software itself but just because learning to code is a pain in the butt it's like learning it is learning a totally different language Visual Studio I write with CP because I'm working in unity if you're working with gdau it's going to be gdos script and if it's unreal you're going to be learning C++ but it really doesn't matter your text tool I would say Visual Studio has some pretty awesome functionality built in like intellisense and code analysis tools has a massive Community it's extensible and has a ton of different plugins and extensions it's platform but the one problem with visual studio and this is a big deal it's just resource intensive it's it's kind of funny because you'll open up visual studio and your your fans will start to spin on your PC it doesn't make any sense whereas with Ryder it has a great performance it's faster less resource intensive but again it just lags behind in terms of its integration with with software like Unity for example moving on to 2D art and you can create 2D art for 3D games and 2D games you don't just have to be making a 2d game to create art for example creating textures right so we're going to go with Photoshop here it's the industry standard there's a ton of support long-term growth and stability it's it's been around for decades there's constant new and useful features it's pretty easy to learn I'd say a 2 out of 10 and it has integration for Unity gdau and unreal what I mean by integration is you don't have to export to a PNG or a JPEG you could just save it as a Photoshop document or a PSD and just bring those files into unity and go back and forth between Unity in Photoshop or unreal in Photoshop or K in Photoshop and just quickly make changes to your Photoshop document and it'll update on the Fly inside of unity whereas with which is our alternative and it's an open source alternative with it's not so simple there's less extensions and you're going to have trouble importing an xcf file which is a file into unity gdau and unreal by default it can be done you just have to install some plugins and packages to get it to work I'm just going to give it a three out of 10 just from what I've read online just seems like it's a little bit more challenging than Photoshop because it has a smaller Community the resources aren't as available on Google for example now here's a little bonus if you want to put pixel art in your game you can use Photoshop you can do it but if you want a better solution a Sprite aprite is I would say industry standard for indie game developers who want to make pixel art games it's tailored for pixel art meaning there's onion skinning frame management Pixel Perfect drawing modes it's a one-time purchase which is better than a subscription with Photoshop and it offers animation and an importer for Unity gdau and unreal pretty cool in terms of difficulty just going to give it a three out of 10 based on my research for those of you who use a Sprite what do you think is it difficult to learn let me know in the comments 3D modeling we're going to go with blender and blender is free and open source it's I would say it's the best open- source tool for game development out there it's just incredible it is such an amazing tool and I used to kind of get frustrated with blender about 6 or seven years ago when they didn't update their UI but their new UI in 3.6 is just beautiful it's simple it's fairly intuitive I will say with blender though it's going to be a 7 out of 10 it's just because it's nothing against a software it's just learning how to do 3D modeling is is a totally different Paradigm than say Photoshop and the cool thing about blender is it has a very strong integration with unity and gdau meaning you don't have to export as an fbx an fbx is like a PNG in the 3D World you don't always have to export as an fbx you can just save it as a DOT blend file and unity will seamlessly import that blend file meaning I can go back and forth between blender and unity constantly making changes and they'll update on the fly in unity this integration is not as strong and unreal I don't know why let me know in the comments what you guys think but unity and gdau it's seamless the alternative is Maya I would say Maya is the industry standard um for triaa games if you want I don't know High Fidelity animation and rigging and modeling use Maya but it's expensive and it's very idiosyncratic meaning there's just very Maya specific things you have to learned whereas with blender it just kind of makes sense out of the box in terms of difficulty we're going to give Maya an eight out of 10 moving on let's talk about 3D painting painting is different than modeling because modeling you're going to build the mesh right the actual shape and then painting you're going to take that shape and bring it into something like substance it used to be called substance painter and you're going to paint on that model as if it's a 3D model in Photoshop and that's actually who owns substance is Adobe and they also own Photoshop right so substance is going to have a very similar experience to photoshop but you're in 3D so you have effects and filters you have a ton of smart materials that you can quickly just paint on your model and there's also just layering layering just like in Photoshop so it's very intuitive I will say the difficulty is well more so than Photoshop so I'm going to give it a 6 out of 10 just because we're working with the z-axis and we're also working with lighting and materials and materials have their own idiosyncrasies now this isn't a free service it's paid so it's going to be around $20 a month the alternative here is armor paint armor paint is open source and it's free the problem is it's less mature there's less support smaller Community less smart materials but in terms of difficulty from what I've read six out of 10 just like substance let's talk about sound effects I'm going to recommend audacity it's free it's got a massive Community it's really really old 23 years old it's super easy to learn I'm going to give it a one out of 10 now audacity is great for just creating one-off sound effects simple atmospheres and soundscapes but if you want to go with something a little bit more I don't know higher Fidelity higher end more complicated with tons of layers and filters and effects sure be my guest you can use audition which is owned by Adobe it's better for massive projects with complex mixing and mastering you can have multi M track editing the problem with audacity is a lot of the effects are destructive meaning if I add Reverb to a sound effect it's going to bake that Reverb into the sound I can't remove it later whereas with audition you can add them all and then tweak them later and so for example if you really didn't like your gunshot sounds Reverb effect you could open it up an audition tweak the Reverb and then reexport it so we're going to give audition a 3 out of 10 whereas audacity is a 1 out of 10 because frankly audacity is just a lot simpler Okay so what do we use for Music Creation if you're going to write your own music I highly suggest logic pro that means however you're going to need to buy a Mac which I actually have a Mac sitting right here on my desk and I also have a PC and I can press a button that switches the monitor between the mac and the PC and that's because I love writing music and I love writing in logic pro it's owned by Apple there's a onetime fee of $1.99 this is way better than Adobe subscription model there's a ton of stock effects and instruments there's a massive Community it's really intuitive to learn very similar to like I don't know Photoshop and Adobe Premiere because there's layers and filters and effects but it's just with sound instead of pixels so I'm going to give it a three out of 10 to learn FL Studio is the alternative if you want to learn how to write music on a PC it is crossplatform however there's a onetime fee of $99 to $88.99 but if you spend about $200 on it you're going to get basically what's in logic pro I would say FL Studio is a little bit more idiosyncratic than Logic Pro meaning there's just hyp specific things about FL Studio that you need to learn that are not necessarily as intuitive as logic pro so I'm going to give it a five out of 10 in terms of difficulty okay last but not least this is the most important tool to learn as a game developer it's going to surprise you it's Adobe Premiere and the reason I say this is because it is becoming increasingly more difficult to get noticed for your game guys even if you make an incredible game you might not get noticed because your marketing material frankly sucks and so what you want to do is create Tik Tok content in I know I saying it I hate I just hate it it feels so impure but you're going to want to create Tik Tok content Instagram content Twitter content and for me it's YouTube content and also trailers trailers for your steam page trailers that hopefully get picked up by IGN and polygon you want your game to shine in the video Realm home okay and that's because ultimately at the end of the day your video is the start of the funnel at the bottom of the funnel is a purchase going down the funnel requires wish listing and getting notified when the game is out in order to get people into your funnel and this is a a traditional sales funnel in order to get them into that funnel you have to have a great trailer so that's why Adobe Premiere is the number one tool for game developers and that's just in 2024 guys that's because there's so many games being released you have to stand out and if you know a D Premiere it's going to make it so much easier to get those wish lists now the alternative here is final gut Studio Final Cut is owned by Apple so if you're for some reason a Mac game developer you can use final cut studio both are pretty pretty easy to learn three out of 10 for a w Premiere in terms of difficulty I'd say four out of 10 for Final Cut just cuz again with a lot of Apple products you're going to get something a little bit more idiosyncratic it tries to be user friendly but at the end of the day it's just something to memorize and something to figure out because Apple wanted to be clever thanks for watching guys and if you like this video be sure to leave a like And subscribe and also remember you can get 50% off my program full-time Game Dev which is a massive program with over 4100 students worldwide you're going to learn everything I know about making games and that includes how to sell them and make six figures before you even finish your game whether it's working with Publishers or crowdfunding and hey on top of that you're going to get my 2D and 3D art program so you're going to learn how to do artwork for games how to make games in unity and unreal and we're also going to wrap up our gdau content for the course as well so click the link below 14 days left 50% off 200 seats available I'll see you there cheers

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 112,064

Keywords: unity vs ue4, unity vs unreal engine 4, unity or unreal engine, how to get into game development, unity vs unreal engine, unity vs ue, unity game engine, unreal, game, engine, better, ue4, school, beginner, study, program, game development beginner, unreal engine graphics, godot engine, top game dev tools, how to make indie games, game development, game engine, unity vs unreal, godot vs unity, substance, 3D modeling, game career

Id: oafQqMg5hco

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023