What's your Game Dev Stack?
I don’t have two decades of career in Game Dev, but I’ve had a couple of Game Jams under my belt, so since people genuinely ask this question I might as well answer 😄 Just take it with a grain of salt, and please let me know if you have better options or more tooling to recommend!
- Godot: Open source and free game engine. Far behind Unreal & Unity in popularity, but probably around 3rd place right after them! I like how well it works even on a Mac Light-weight, easy version control with git, and a “node-based” and “object-oriented” approach which “just clicks” with me due to web /app dev!
- VSCode: Godot has a built-in editor for the scripts too, written in their Python-esque bespoke language GDScript, but I do use VSCode alongside. I find it much faster to switch files in it for example, and I prefer the formatting.
- Itch.io: For Game Assets as well as publishing the games. I’d hope to make “real games you’d buy” at some point, which you can upload to Itch as well, but at that point I’d want to put them in an actual store-front, like Steam. Until then Itch is a great simple way to host the game builds, and what seems to be the place for all Game Jams.
- Kenney & Kay: I have extremely limited artistic ability, so I do look in the community for Game Assets. Kenney & Kay both have tons of free stuff, I really like their styles, and I actually met them both last month in IndieDevDay Barcelona!
- Figma: For “marketing” key art, and some quick & dirty svg icons, useful for particles!
- Aseprite: Even with my (lack of) artistic ability, I can somewhat tweak pixel art, and I use Aseprite to do so
- Blender: See above for artistic ability, but I do sometimes put three assets together in Blender
- Cleanshot: For quick screenshots and video capture
It’s fair to say that VSCode, Figma & Cleanshot may be more unconventional picks, and definitely driven by how I use and like them already from Web Dev 😄