What tools do you use daily?

Questions
#1

In my dev process on a daily basis I use these tools:

  1. defold obviously
  2. 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.
  3. krita for png painting , screenshot exporting, some animation- sometimes gimp as well for animation
  4. asesprite or pixler for pixel art or animated pixel art when needed
  5. audacity for sound editing and format conversion
  6. google docs, spreadsheet, mindmaps
  7. tiled for tilemap making
  8. brave- webbrowser with about 30tabs open as I research and multitask.
  9. wondershare video editing and screen recorder
  10. Filezilla for ftp transfers
  11. Bluegriffon for html
  12. 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.

What do you guys use?

6 Likes
#2

Great list of tools!

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!

5 Likes
#3

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!

Check out affinity designer. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

5 Likes
#4

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.

4 Likes
#5

Ive used Reaper but I didnt want to pay for it. But it was ok.

1 Like
#6

My list:

  • Defold ofc.
  • iTerm2 - terminal + zsh shell
  • Sublime Text - text editor for everything
  • SmartGit - my fav. git client
  • 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.
6 Likes
#7

I used sublime at first then later zbstudio for LOVE2d.

Im gonna checkout fontforge.

Thanks

3 Likes
#8

Defold: !

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

5 Likes
#9

Similar here, Intellij as IDE with Defold API.
7-zip for file compression.

4 Likes
#10

Sounds interesting! Can you share a screenshot?

4 Likes
#11

I’m using macOS and my toolset generally:

  • Terminal - for general command-line usage
  • 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.

6 Likes
#12

Here it is. Probably there are simpler and better ways to do this…

34
Schermata 2021-01-06 alle 13.00.34.jpg3816Ă—1642 883 KB

Essentially a sequencer…

7 Likes
#13
  • 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
6 Likes
#14

In no particular order

More common

  • Defold - Duh!
  • 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
  • Blender - Whenever something 3D needs to be done
6 Likes
#15

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 :slight_smile:

Command line tools:

  • zsh, msys2, cmd - The shell to run command in
  • git - for version control
  • rg - Ripgrep
  • (alternatively ag - The Silver Searcher)
  • bash, python, batch files - for scripting
  • wget, curl - for retrieving files / debugging http requests
  • ios-deploy - For deploying/debugging .ipa/.app on an iPhone directly
  • adb - To communicate with an Android. From Android toolchain
  • nano - for text editing
  • convert (ImageMagick) - For manipulating images/video
  • file - for getting meta data from a file
  • afinfo, afplay - for getting sound meta data / playing a sound
  • zip, tar, lz4, zstd, jar - for compressing/extracting archives
  • java jdk - for running bob.jar
  • md5, shasum - For quick checksums of files
  • find - for finding files
  • grep - for filtering output from other tools
  • xargs - using output from other tools (e.g. find) as argument to another command

Code editing:

  • Sublime Text 3 - Code editing (Plugins crashes a lot for me)
  • VSCode - Currently evaluating as a new cross platform IDE
  • IntelliJ - For editing Clojure
  • nano - for editing in command line

Debugging:

  • gdb, lldb, ios-deploy - For debugging programs via command line
  • VSCode - For visual debugging on macOS/Linux
  • Visual Studio - For windows debugging (on Win32)
  • Android Studio - For visual debugging Android apps, and extracting data from device
  • XCode - For visual debugging iOS/MacOS apps
  • RenderDoc - For debugging graphics
  • Safari, Chrome, Edge - for debugging html5

Content creation:

  • Photoshop - for creating. Poor for debugging images imho.
  • Blender - For modeling/animation
  • Pyxel Edit - For sprite art/animations

Other Tools:

  • Docker - for creating/running containers
  • Preview (macOS) - Previewing images/documents
  • Parallels Desktop - A VM to run Linux/Windows
  • AWS + cli - Cloud storage for storing my site

Planning/Documents:

  • github.com - For work projects
  • Trello - For planning personal projects
  • Calendar (macOS)
  • Google Calendar
  • Lucid Charts - For diagrams
  • Google Sheets/Docs

Version control

CI/CD (a.k.a. autobuilders)

  • github.com - For work. Migrating personal projects here now
  • AppVeyor - macOS, Windows, Linux support
  • Travis - macOS, Linux support

Misc:

  • Godbolt.org - For comparing output code between compilers
  • Regex 101 - For writing new regular expressions
  • Shadertoy - For playing with shaders
  • Firefox - For browsing
  • Telegram - for chats (personal use)
  • Slack (Web client) - for chats (work only)
  • Hugo - For static site generation

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.

10 Likes
#16

ah, good point. I use GIPHY Capture for the same reason.

4 Likes
#17

@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?

2 Likes
#18

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:

5 Likes
#19

@roccosaienz you can try this(includes full API + C sdk):
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=selimanac.defold-vsc-snippets

It works fine for me :stuck_out_tongue:

5 Likes
#20

I am going to try it! Thanks @selimanac

2 Likes