Brick #9: Tools, tools everywhere!

So, you know what you are going to be but you don't know which are the best tools to do the job?
In this short post we will give you a basic outline of the tools available.

Programmers:

Based on the technology you are going to work in your project you would go with something that can be used alongside it..! For instance, if you are an XNA programmer / Monogame user / C++ programmer you would go with Visual Studio. If you are going the strict C# way without some DirectX wrappers, you could also use Visual Studio along with Expression Blend. Then again if you are a flash programmer, Adobe Flash CS5 and newer would do just the job for you, whilist if you code in java, eclipse or netbeans is the way to go!

Then again, there are game engines in which you can make games quick and rough. Some industry-based engines you could use are the Unity 3D game engine and the Unreal engine. There are also many commercial engines that can produce AAA quality games such as Cryengine, gamebryo. That would solve your problem.


Artists:

Photoshop and illustrator are your best friends on this journey if you plan on creating 2D graphical assets, or even pixel art, textures, spritesheets, UV maps and such.

If you are on the 3D edge however, there are programs such as 3DsMax, Maya, Blender, Houdini, Cinema 4D and ZBrush that will make your modelling, rigging and animating lives easier.

for the musicians and the sfx experts, there are plenty of software out there, that can help you compose your very own music, such as flstudio, adobe audition, magix music maker, and other.


Designers:

You can use anything, since there is no specific tool for the job, you can either start prototyping in photoshop, write down some ideas in MS Word or even in that post-it note besides your pc monitor, you can check out other illustrations and pixel art of other users and get inspired, play games and write everything you can on notepad, as well as grabbing game engines that write the code for you, or are just event based.

We are talking about GameMaker, Multimedia Fusion 2 developer , Construct 2, Torque, RPGMaker, anything that you can tinker with, try out your ideas and have a game prototype ready in less than an hour or so if you know what has to be done and how it gets done right.


QA Testers:

The absolute tool for a tester would be a notepad, and his gaming system. The tester needs to be proficient with Word / Excel and other similar programs as he will need to point out all the possible bugs of the game and give a detailed report to the programmers about it.