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 developer's 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 two out of 10. It's not a one 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 Thomas, 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 because it can get overwhelming and it's ultimately going to lead you to probably quit your game because you've well not managed the project well. So, me and my team use ClickUp. ClickUp's awesome because you can assign and create tasks 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 3 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 seen the ads for 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. 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 midjourney. I know what you're thinking. AI art is evil. 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 midjourney. So, for example, if I say to my 3D artist Filipe, if I say, I want it to look like Walt Disney designed a pistol in 1930, he's going to think, what is Thomas talking about? So, I'll just go to MidJourney and and get some AI art created and send it to Filipe 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 texton prompts. A good way to think of it is midjourney is like using command prompt and Adobe Firefly is like using an actual piece of software with buttons to click. So, in terms of difficulty, midjourney would be a four out of 10. It's kind of weird getting used to the text prompts and using it on Discord. Adobe Firefly one 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 their 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 as well. 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 crossplatform. 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 five out of 10. Just like Unity, GDO 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 Ryder. 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 C because I'm working in Unity. If you're working with GDO, it's going to be GDAUS 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. Uh, it's extensible and has a ton of different plugins and extensions. It's multiplatform, 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 2D 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 and Photoshop or Unreal and Photoshop or GDAU and 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, GDO, 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. A- sprite 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 onetime purchase, which is better than a subscription with Photoshop. And it offers animation and an importer for Unity, GDO, 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 7 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 the software. 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 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 in Unreal. I don't know why. Let me know in the comments what you guys think. But Unity and GDO, it's seamless. The alternative is Maya. I would say Maya is the industry standard um for AAA games. If you want, I don't know, highfidelity 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 learn. Whereas with Blender, it just kind of makes sense out of the box. In terms of difficulty, we're going to give Maya an 8 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, 6 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 1 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, higherend, 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 could have multitrack 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 in Audition, tweak the reverb, and then reexport it. So, we're gonna give Audition a three out of 10, whereas Audacity is a one 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 3 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 $8.99, 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 hypersp 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, Polygon. You want your game to shine in the video realm, 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 wishlisting 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 Adobe Premiere, it's going to make it so much easier to get those wish lists. Now, the alternative here is Final Cut 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 Adobe 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 userfriendly, 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.