The Best Game Developer Tools (ULTIMATE List To Start A Game Studio!)

I can't tell you how many times I've stumbled across videos on YouTube that try and make gamedev look easy. So, let's talk about the 12 steps that you can do to achieve your very first indie game studio. It's not me. It wasn't me. I didn't say that. The truth is making indie games can be distilled down in 12 easy steps. But below the tip of the iceberg are dozens of tools and websites that you might want to know about. And at the end of the video, you're gonna know how to run a game studio like this guy and that guy. Okay, so let's start with the top of the iceberg, the very tippy top of the iceberg. Okay, Windows. Um, so I just just use Windows even though it's ugly. Use Windows. All right, let's move a little bit to the kind of top part of the iceberg here. Uh, this is going to be our tools. I'm reading all the tools here. I've got a huge list. Unity. Okay, this is Unreal's competitor. Unity takes everything. It's kind of like the the

engine of our car here. It takes everything, the Photoshop art, the Blender 3D models, the code, the sounds, it brings it all together and puts it into an actual game. Okay, so Unity is free. It's pretty awesome. Let's move on to our art tools. Okay, Photoshop and Blender. Photoshop is our 2D art. And even to by 2D I mean you can also create textures and put them onto 3D objects. But you can also create pixel art and 2D sprites. And I do both. I've made 2D games and 3D games. Now the 3D tool we're going to use is Blender. Blender is a little bit difficult to learn, but it is my 3D art tool of choice. Now when it comes to code, we're going to use Visual Studio, and that's what Unity sort of recommends out of the box. Okay. So, you get to go back and forth between Visual Studio, which is Coding, and Unity while you're making your game. When it comes to our sound, we're going to use Audacity. Audacity is again a free tool. It's not the prettiest tool, but it allows us to take all of our

sounds that we're going to gather, and we'll talk about the websites that I use. And it allows you to create and mix various sound effects that you can then export and bring inside of Unity and play these sounds when you, for example, shoot a gun or kill an enemy or break a box or collect a coin. Now, when it comes to music, if you want to write your own music, you can use Logic Pro, which is a fee of 200 bucks. But the problem is you have to use Logic Pro with a Mac, which kind of sucks. I've actually got a Mac, a Mac behind the camera that I use only for music production. Okay, let's move a little bit down to the cute little belly of our iceberg here. And this is our core websites that I use. And I know this sounds weird. It's like, okay, well, what do websites have to do with making games? Computer loadup. Celery man, please. Well, they have everything to do with making games. The first one, and this is

huge, this is our version control tool. For example, if I'm working with a team, I have a team member in Vancouver and I'm in South Carolina all the way on the east coast of the United States. We push our changes to our game father on GitHub. Okay? So, github.com. We actually pay a fee to have a a large storage something LTS. LTS allows for large files. Okay. And we use GitHub to do this and we pay a fee but you can use it for free and I think a lot of you might be intimidated by the idea of using GitHub because you think you have to learn all this code to use GitHub. I just use GitHub desktop. Now moving on down to communication with a team member. We use Discord. For sound effects, I use artlist.io. It is a fee, but it's got some great sounds and I spend a lot of time on there. [Music] [Laughter]

Now, if you want a completely free sound source, use freesound.org. Freeound.org allows for as long as you're checking again the license on each sound, it allows for commercial use. Okay. Now, the sounds on freesound.org or because they're free. They're just uploaded by the community. So, a lot of them kind of suck, right? So, you have to be able to to take a lot of different sound samples, bring them into Audacity. Again, that's our our sound tool. Now, when it comes to music, I'm not going to recommend you use Epidemic Sound because Epidemic Sound is great for like YouTube videos if you want to put music in like a devlog, but putting music into your actual game, I'm still waiting on that. I will let you know in 3 2 1. Oh, look. I just got a message from David. Why the creator of the first tree and a very good friend of mine. Music bed is the best by far. More indie cinematic stuff there. Pond five is where I found most of the first tree music. Some gems there for sure.

Great. Thanks. All right, guys. It's going to get frigid. We're going to go below the surface of the iceberg. First part of the dive is our business stuff. Okay, we're running a business, right? A game studio is a business. Let's start with Google. Now, hold on, hold on, hold on. Don't click off the video. I know that's kind of annoying. It's like, are you serious? You're going to tell us about Google? I just want to let you know, you shouldn't feel bad that you're using Google all day long when you're making your game. It's totally fine to not know anything about what you're doing and constantly Google solutions. In fact, 15 years after learning how to make games, I'm still googling. And that's like the majority of the time I spend coding is on Google. really because I just copy and paste code and bring it in my game. Okay. Um, let's move on to really quick. I know this is annoying, but Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. I know this is annoying because you're thinking, "Okay, Thomas is just giving us stupid stuff." No, no, no. Gmail, Google Docs,

Google Sheets, and Google Slides are how I secure six figures from publishers. It's how I actually build these massive relationships with big publishers, investors, YouTubers, right? So, you spending a lot of your time in Google Docs and Google Sheets and Google Slides building presentations for let's say publishers and spending a lot of time in email, you're going to think, man, I'm wasting my time. But you're not wasting your time. You should be spending 40 40% maybe even 50% half your time just managing the business side, these relationships. Okay. Then finally, the final part about business stuff is Steamworks. Okay. Steamworks is ugly. It's slow. It's annoying. It's confusing. It's not surprising when you go to act the actual Steam store that their back end is even grosser. Um, but Steamworks is gross. And so, if you feel intimidated when you finally enter Steamworks to upload your game and build your store page, don't feel bad. It It does suck. Okay. All right. Let's move

down the What is this? It's an iceberg. Let's move down the iceberg to the marketing tools. Okay, this is freaking huge. Now, once you partner with a publisher, hopefully they'll handle all this crap. I want you to know how to use this stuff and what they're doing so that you don't overvalue a publisher in your head. A lot of indies, they think of a publisher as sort of like an authority figure or like a god-like figure because they understand marketing. Oo, marketing. Well, it's not that complicated. Well, it is complicated and I'm going to try and decomplicate it for you right now. Here's what I use in ter when I do marketing stuff. Uh, I use Mailchimp. And by the way, I have like 50,000 subscribers on my Mailchimp list. A Mailchimp list is beautiful. Uh, it's basically a Steam wish list, but you have control of when you send emails and notify your potential buyers of when a game is on sale. Now, I pay a lot of money for this. I pay like $500 a month for this, but it's worth it. It's totally worth it. Um, if you don't want to use Mailchimp, you can also use Gmass and it basically is totally free and it

allows you to send out batch emails to thousands of people on your list. Okay. U, Mailchimp and GMass are great for reaching out to your subscribers, letting them know when your game is on sale, letting them know when you h have an alpha build ready for them and you need some feedback. Uh, or it's great for even reaching out to the press, right? If you have 200, 300 people on the press list, you can use GMass or Mailchimp to send them a batch email. I don't recommend this, but if you don't have a lot of time and you just want to send out a batch email to the press and cross your fingers, I think it's a great solution. Okay, Lingree. Lree actually links all of my links to all of my different products. So, I do have online courses and assets, but I also have games, right? If I want to sell multiple games on my social media platforms, and we'll talk about that, that's Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube. If I have all of these variety of links, I've got Never Song, you know, I've got here's Never Song, I've got Pinstripe, right? If I've got all these games, I've got Father, which is my next game, and I want people to wishlist it. This is all

stored in my link tree. Now, that brings me to social media, right? I use all of these, and I highly recommen recommend you use all of these during your workday as you're making your game. Again, 40 to 50% of your time should be spent doing business stuff and marketing stuff and building a swell of of of of audience members interested in buying your game. Now, just really quick, instead of using Facebook and Instagram, uh their apps, I use something called Creator Studio. And this is just basically Facebook's little website that allows you to upload Instagram videos on your actual computer. Social media is huge. I I I I could do a whole video on it and I have done a whole video on it, but we're not going to get into that now. I just just do it. Just do social media despite the fact that I do personally hate social media. I still do it. I use Premiere to create videos, by the way. So, Adobe Premiere is how I create videos for YouTube de um and also Instagram and Tik Tok. Tik Tok. So, that's what I use is

Premiere. And again, the social media presence is meant to drive traffic to your games. Okay? It's really hard to do it without it. I use Kickstarter, so I've had two different Kickstarter campaigns. One raised over six figures, one raised just below six figures. Um, Kickstarter is great. You can use Indiegogo as well or Backer Kit. In terms of meetings with publishers, I use Zoom. Um, and when I do live streams or I stream with the press, let's say the press wants to talk about my game or a YouTuber wants to partner with me and do a video, I use Streamlabs. And then finally, finally, the the sort of core of all of this is your website, right? So, how do you build your website? Well, I recommend learning HTML and doing it all from scratch. No, I don't. That's a joke. I use Squarespace. Okay? Squarespace makes it super duper easy, and they have sponsored this. I'm just kidding. They haven't sponsored this video, but I do use Squarespace. They're awesome. Okay? So, all of those are my marketing tools, but we're going to

continue our little dive here. Let's get a little bit deeper. It's getting cold. It's getting dark. But this one's huge. This one is what I call the cheating section. These are the tools that most game developers use when they're creating games, but they don't really talk about it. Okay, the first one is Turbos Squid. Okay, turbosquid.com. You can get a lot of free assets here. By assets, I mean 3D models. Okay, so if you're making a 3D game, Turbos Squid is a great place to find 3D models. Now, if you want to retexture those, you can hand paint those in Photoshop or you can just go to textures.com and buy some cheap textures and then reskin those Turbos Squid models and make them your own. Right? This is called asset flipping. Now, if you want to animate your models, you just go to Miximo, which is owned by Adobe, totally free, and you upload, as long as your model is rigged properly, you upload your FBX file. And Miximo has all these animations. So, when you guys see a

really great indie game with great animations from the enemies walking around like zombies or jumping, they're probably just getting their animations from mocap. That's motion capture and that's uploaded to Miximo. I also use the the Unity asset store. Okay, by the way, this video is sponsored by the I'm just kidding. The Unity asset store is incredible. Okay, there's so many free assets, but there's also paid ones. I recommend getting paid ones. So, if you have the cash to spend $150 on an asset that's going to take you 30 hours to make from scratch, you should you should get the asset right now. When it comes to concepting, if I if I need some concept art and I'm having trouble visualizing what's in my game, honestly, I just go to MidJourney, which MidJourney is AI art. I pay for midjourney. So, I just type in imagine and then I imagine a gray goose flying into a burning building. And there you

go. You've got this beautiful AI art. And believe it or not, I actually incorporate a lot of this art into paintings in my horror game, Father. So, you can use it as a concept piece. And as long as you're also using the proper license with MidJourney, you can also use it in your game. Now, at the very very bottom, at the deepest, darkest depths, I have my secret weapon, audible.com. And this video is sponsored by Aud. I'm just kidding. And so, I spend my free time, whether I'm at the gym or, you know, after the gym, at the sauna. I love going to the sauna lately. Um, or before bed, I just pop in my headphones and I listen to motivational books. I don't really listen to technical books or game development books. I just listen to the motivational stuff because for me personally, and I think this is probably true for you, your greatest risk as a game developer has nothing to do with the technical side. It has everything to do with you getting in the way of yourself. So, there's a list below in the description of all the audio books that I recommend you listen to. Um, why

would you read them? You should listen to them.