In my dev process on a daily basis I use these tools:
defold obviously
affinity designer for svg, gui, logo and png export- rarely create any raster art in this but it can and does do raster and vector. So I can create a raster image open in affinity and add vector elements then export to preferred size and the vector elements are rasterized with minimal quality loss.
krita for png painting , screenshot exporting, some animation- sometimes gimp as well for animation
asesprite or pixler for pixel art or animated pixel art when needed
audacity for sound editing and format conversion
google docs, spreadsheet, mindmaps
tiled for tilemap making
brave- webbrowser with about 30tabs open as I research and multitask.
wondershare video editing and screen recorder
Filezilla for ftp transfers
Bluegriffon for html
for 3d I like Kenny’s Asset forge, VIACAD, Sketchup (Construction and general mockups. Would combine with godot and make First person 3d mini games with proposed new construction customers could walk thru to boost new construction sales. Though I bet I could do that wit Defold if needed huh?), I try to use blender and suck at it. And an old program anim8te.
I try and stick with FOSS or lowcost options.
what I need to learn is git. game marketing, and distributor standards.
I’m using macOS and spend a lot of time in the following tools:
Terminal - building Defold engine/editor code or building Defold games using build scripts
Atom - Most code and text editing. Somewhat of a resource hog and I’ll probably look for an alternative (Sublime?)
Defold obviously
AseSprite for pixel art
Google Chrome for browsing and:
Google Docs, Sheets, Slides
Gmail and Google Calendar
Google Meet, Zoom etc (I refuse to install any of the stand alone clients!)
Slack (4 workspaces), WhatsApp, Discord (passive) (I refuse to install any of the stand alone clients!)
Spotify and YouTube for music
Forklift - local and remote file access (I really dislike macOS Finder)
Dash - accessing reference documentation
GitHub for Desktop - Basic but usually works well enough for my needs (my alternative would probably be Git Tower if I was forced to change)
I rarely use Audacity and every time I do I feel like I want an alternative (any suggestions?)
I sometimes need to use Inkscape to modify and export an SVG to bitmap format but Inkscape is absolutely horrible. I’d love to get a suggestion for an alternative!
I sometimes need to use **Inkscape** to modify and export an SVG to bitmap format but Inkscape is absolutely horrible. I’d love to get a suggestion for an alternative!
One of our colleagues uses Reaper and he’s really happy with it. It’s not free though. I also use Ableton Live Lite (came with some of my music hardware) for my light music-making stints, but that’s better for MIDI than for editing PCM. Reaper and Audacity are better at that.
FontForge - very useful tool when I need to change some font parameters or add a missing glyph.
Tiled - my fav. tile/level editor
Communication: Telegram, TweetDeck, Slack, Discord (I don’t like Slack, but there is the official Defold “chat” in Slack)
Safari + Chrome - yep, I use both
Many cloud services (each one for it’s own purpose): Dropbox, Google Disk (“Backup and sync from Google” - the new name of the program), Yandex Disk, iCloud.
Sublime editor: for everything and it’s already in the Defold editor (am I right?)
Tiled: a level in our current game is like a music score created in Tiled for visual help
FontForge: used few times, it is not so easy for me
Trello: track tasks and (many) bugs
SourceTree: for version control
Affinity Designer: is awesome! really fantastic!
Gimp: rarely for some filter
Spine: for (few) complex animation impossible with go.animate, typically character animations
Blender: extremely rarely for some 3D primitives
Fmod Studio: for minimal editing of the audio project
BBEdit - for general scripting, text editing, munging, etc.
Tower - fantastic Git GUI.
Nova - when BBEdit won’t do.
Kaleidoscope - for diff (incl. images)
Defold - obviously…
Google Chrome for browsing and:
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides
Gmail, Calendar, Meet, and Keep
Notion - for notes, research, etc.
Spotify and Idagio for music
Adobe Creative Cloud:
Illustrator - vector illustration
Photoshop - bitmap editor
Audition - audio editing
Animate - sprites, GIFs
InDesign - documentation (PDF)
After Effects - motion sketches, GIFs, etc.
Glyphs - font manipualtion
Ableton Live - music and sound design
Aseprite and Pixaki (iPad) - for pixel art
I’ve tried to switch from Adobe (after 25 years) to Affinity several times, but after waiting 5+ years for basic missing features such as blend tools, proper node reduction, plug-in/scripting support, etc to materialize I’ve unfortunately had to remain with Adobe.
Terminal - I live a good chunk of my life in here. Used iTerm in the past, but plain old Terminal is good enough nowdays. CLI tools I use often:
zsh with oh-my-zsh - Great for the awesome autocomplete and git aliases
fasd - Reads-your-mind fuzzy search cd to anywhere. Couldn’t live without it.
git - Nothing beats the CLI
gh - Github CLI client
brew - Package manager. Can you even dev on macOS without brew?
npm / yarn - Node/web dev
VSCode - Most of my coding happens here
Alfred - Better and faster Spotlight search. Great for launching apps and fuzzy searching files and directories. Also has a great clipboard manager.
Spectacle - Window management keyboard shortcuts.
Defold - Of course.
Safari - Main browser. I like the battery life and Keychain sync. I sometimes use Chrome for development (better dev tools), but not a fan of the Google ecosystem.
Keychain Access - I use it a lot, even manually, to store sensitive notes, API keys and passwords, since I have two computers and I like them synced.
Spark Mail - Mail client.
Apple Calendar - Boring, but does the job.
VMWare Fusion - Testing stuff in VMs.
Docker - Testing/bootstrapping random stuff.
Ableton Live / Garageband - Music production (hobby).
Adobe CC - The odd asset cleanup, minor design job or video editing.
Apple Motion - Video editing when I don’t need to share the project with Windows users
Way too many Electron messaging apps: Telegram (not Electron), Discord, Facebook Messenger, Slack
Spotify - For music. Electron, but meh.
Apple Notes - Notes
Cloud services: Google Drive Backup & Sync, Google Docs, Google Sheets
Scrivener 3 - Writing in general. Some notes, some game story.
ScreenToGif - Makings GIFs or MP4s of game issues or examples quickly.
Zeal - Used for offline docs for Defold on Windows
Clip Studio Paint - Majority of game art
PureRef - Floating reference images
NotePad++ - Most basic text editing
Dropbox Paper - Collaborative todo lists / notes / internal documentation, I prefer it over Google Docs these days - still use Google Sheets when a spreadsheet needs to be used
Discord - Chat
GitHub for Desktop + Sourcetree - I use both to separate private and public work
Greenshot - General screenshots
GlassWire - Firewall traffic
Everything - Best Windows file search
Less common
Pyxel Edit - Pixel art… though I sometimes still use Graphics Gale out of habit
Spine - Character animations
Reaper - DAW I use for audio editing (making new effects usually from multiple library sounds I purchased), batch conversions
Affinity Designer - Whenever a vector thing needs to be made
Photoshop CS6 - When I’m forced to use it for work
Here are the ones I could think of right away.
There are probably plenty of command line tools I forgot in this list, but usually I can find it again.
Just add “command line” to your google searches
If there’s one thing I’d recommend out of this, is for those that use command lines a lot, is to learn CTRL + R.
It allows you to search the previous command history, which helps you avoid re-writing long commands.
I use this many times per day, and it is really a good time saver (especially when I don’t remember the long and tricky Apple Developer ID) or long paths.
@dapetcu21 probably a stupid question: you use VSCode for Defold (lua script) programming? I used sometime VSCode with haxe and I love it! Is it possible to use it for Defold? with api autocomplete?
Ish. No Defold API autocomplete yet (I would like to work on that at some point), but you have autocomplete for modules and other stuff. Here’s my settings:
