7 Tools Every Indie Game Developer Needs in 2026 (And ONE That Actually Matters Most)

I've been making games for half of my life and here's what I've noticed. 90% of indie game developers, they simply just quit their projects over and over and over again. And honestly, I get it. In 2026, there's thousands of game dev tools and tips and tricks to learn and ultimately this leads to analysis [music] paralysis. Which game dev tools, which skills actually matter? What are the ones you really need to learn and what are the ones you can just kind of throw away and ignore? plus years of making three commercial indie titles, I kind of think I've cracked the code. The truth is there's only seven tools that really matter in creating and releasing your dream indie game on Steam or console and this video is going to probably stir the pot a little bit because I'm not going to give you alternatives. I'm just going to give you the ones that I recommend. Also, I want you to stick around to the end because one of these seven tools is [music] 10 times more important than the rest. All right, let's start with our development tool. The one that I'm going to

recommend, the one I've been using for I think 10 plus years, I'm going to recommend Unity. I think Unity is really versatile for both 2D and 3D. It has its flaws. I think it's a bloated engine sometimes and I don't love the business practices of Unity from a couple years ago. They've since changed leadership and I'm hopeful that their business practices change, but Unity overall is just a very versatile engine both for 2D and 3D development. Two of my 2D games I built with Unity and released on pretty much every platform. And also, hey, my 3D game, my current 3D game Twisted Tower, was built in Unity as well. I think Unreal's great for hyper polished more AAA looking environments. It's very advantageous for high fidelity games and they look beautiful and they look amazing, but it's not the best engine for 2D development, at least yet. As for Godot, yes, it's open source and yes, it's great for 2D development, but I don't

think that it's there yet for 3D development, although they are making headway. Number two, let's talk about the coding tools you need to learn. Now, I recommend Unity so you if you're going to use Unity, you're going to probably want to learn C#. If you're going to learn Unreal, you can use their visual coding, which is blueprints, or you can learn C++. If you're going to learn Godot, then you're going to want to learn Godot script. But specifically focusing on Unity, if you're going to learn C#, you're probably going to want to use Visual Studio. Now, there's also VS Code, which is Visual Studio's kind of baby brother and it's much more lightweight. I'll be honest with you, the full Visual Studio package which with all of the extensions for Unity, it's bloated. It takes a while to load. Anytime you open up Visual Studio, your fans are going to start spinning. I I don't know why. I'm going to be honest, Copilot is kind of insane. Copilot is an

extension inside of Visual Studio that allows for you to have Claude or ChatGPT help you out with your code. It's incredibly helpful and it's great if you want to quickly cross-check various parts of your code and also just resolve any bugs in your scripts. Ultimately, Visual Studio is officially supported by Unity and well, has strong integration with Unity. So, I'm going to recommend Visual Studio as the software for writing C# code. Number three, let's talk about art. When it comes to both 2D and 3D art, you're going to need to learn something like Photoshop. I'm just going to recommend Photoshop. I know that it's like a $20 fee with Adobe, but I've been paying Adobe for
[laughter]
I think 12 years because it's that useful. And it's great for 2D if you want to do illustrated 2D environments or sprites for your 2D game, but also with 3D it's great for creating textures and editing UV maps from assets you've

downloaded. Also, it's fully integrated with Unity so I don't have to export a PNG. I don't have to export a JPEG. I can just save a PSD file or a PSB file, which is a much larger Photoshop file that can include layers inside of Unity. Now, when it comes to 3D art, I'm going to recommend Blender. Blender is actually completely free and open source. It has a strong integration with both Unity, Godot, and Unreal. You don't really need to export an FBX anymore. You can just save it as a blend file, import it into Unity and go back and forth between Blender and Unity and it will update inside of Unity on the fly. So, it's one thing to actually model your 3D models in Blender. It's another thing to texture them, right? To actually add texture to your models. This is where it gets a little bit difficult. The recommendation is Substance, which is owned by I'm so sorry. It's owned by Adobe, so you're going to have to pay for it. And it's very similar to Photoshop in terms of its layering, right? And it's effects.

There's a huge library of smart materials you can use and it is a little bit difficult to learn. Now, this is something that I don't often talk about, but it's becoming increasingly more important, especially if you're making 3D games and you want to rig and animate your models. Now, obviously, you can use Unity's built-in animation timeline to animate, you know, hard surface models and assets, but if you want to animate actual, well, humanoid characters in your game, well, you could definitely use something like Blender or I recommend Real Illusion's tools for character creation and animation. Character Creator is for creating humanoid meshes. Humanoid organic models, they're tough. So, if you want to take a base model that you can get from Real Illusion Character Creator, tweak the facial structure, change the gender or the hair or the skin color and the clothing, you can do that and bring it directly into your game. What's cool

about Character Creator is it's also the characters are fully automatically rigged. We can bring this character including its rig with the body and the hands and the face, we can bring that into Real Illusion iClone 8. And this is what I've actually used for my own game, Twisted Tower. iClone 8 is awesome. It's a great way to animate entire sequences, but for my own game Twisted Tower, I animated my characters, I animated the cameras and the lights and brought in various assets for the apartment or the exteriors. But not only can we export and render out these sequences, we can also take these scenes and actually just save them and import them into Unity using Unity's auto setup tool and also the data link tool to bring in the entire animated scene from iClone 8 into Unity so that it's a real-time scene, real-time meshes and animations directly in Unity. Data link is actually really, really cool. I could take an entire

scene like this scene here and simply just, well, link it up to Unity. I mean, that's pretty cool. So, now we don't have to have a pre-rendered cutscene. We can actually have a full sequence that we can interact with inside of Unity. And by the way, this video is sponsored by Real Illusion. I love this tool so much that I reached out to them and said, "Hey guys, let me help promote your tool because I love it. It's been a godsend for Twisted Tower." By the way, guys, there is a link below to try a free trial of Real Illusion Suite 365. You could try Character Creator, you can try iClone 8. And if you like it, it's only $50 a month for almost all of the tools, which is pretty cool. Moving on. Number five, sound effects. I'm just going to recommend it right out of the gate. It's Audacity. Audacity is free, it's awesome, it's so easy to learn. There's a massive community. I think it's like 24 or 25 years old and I've been using it for I guess the majority of my life. You simply just download your sounds and you can mix and match

them. You can reverse them, you can add reverb, you can add effects, you can cut and clip. Number six, if you want to write your own music or maybe just mix and match some music to create some tracks, I recommend Logic Pro. The problem is Logic Pro is Mac. So, that's why I have I have a Mac Studio just for music creation in Logic Pro. Now, if you want a similar Logic Pro layout and vibe, but you want to do it on PC, you can learn Cubase. I recommend Cubase for PC users for writing your own music. Coming in at number seven, let's talk about marketing tools. The single most important marketing tool that I can think of, that I use over and over and over again, is, well, obviously Photoshop, but we've already talked about Photoshop. It is Adobe Premiere. Adobe Premiere is a video editing tool. It's not that hard to learn. It's pretty straightforward to learn.

All we're going to use it for is bringing clips into Adobe Premiere and creating marketing material, whether it's TikTok videos, Instagram videos, Twitter videos, or YouTube devlogs, or trailers for your Steam page. Now, you may be wondering, how do I record my footage? You record your footage with Unity Recorder. So, simply use Unity Recorder to record 4K footage at 60 frames per second, bring it into Adobe Premiere, and create your trailers or your TikTok videos or your YouTube devlogs. Okay, so those are the seven tools. Now, I mentioned that one of those tools, one of those tools is the absolute best tool to learn and this isn't a trick, although you might think it is. The best tool, the single best tool is the one that you are passionate about and the one that is your gifting. Okay, find the tool. Find the tool that you feel like you're the most gifted at and that you're also the most passionate

about. If you could find that tool with that contains those two properties, that is the tool that is the most important. For me specifically, my [music] thing that I love the absolute most, that I'm the most passionate about, is storytelling, okay? My gifting is creating atmospheres and stories and [music] worlds. So, my tool of choice, the one that I am going to focus most of my effort and energy on [music] is actually art tools, okay? So, for me it's art. If I focus my energy on learning those tools and mastering [music] those art tools, whether it's Photoshop or Blender, they're going to make my games shine and stand out. If you're really gifted at music, I want you to master the music tools cuz those are going to be the most [music] advantageous for you. If you're a remarkable coder and you know how to make quality economical [music] code that will help your game run smoothly, then focus on C# and Visual Studio. Ultimately, your job is to stand out, okay? The way you stand out is you create a voice and you take that voice,

you master that voice, and you stand out amongst the sea of other Steam games. [music] All right, those are the only seven tools I think you need to learn as a game developer. Now, obviously, there's plenty of other little tools that you might need to learn, but I think those seven are going to get you where you want to go as an indie game developer. And don't forget to click the link below to check out the Realusion trial to try out iClone 8 or Character Creator. And if you like it, you can subscribe to Realusion 3D Suite 365 at only $50 a month for almost all of the tools from the Realusion Suite.