What tools do you use daily?

Work day:

Houdini
Maya
Sublime Text
A huge list of proprietary softwares
The whole Google Suite

Work night:

Defold (ofc)
VSCode
Aseprite
Pixelmator
Davinci Resolve
Blender
Audacity
Affinity Designer
Image Optim
Krita
Pico-8
Origami Studio
The whole Google Suite
Media Human Audio Converter

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Affinity- thats why I use Krita with Affinty.

But Adobe does offer a full solutions sweet. I have used Photoshop since 2003 but when they went to a subscription model and that put me off. I do not like subscription services. I dont mind paying for software, but I do not like buying something and learning I never bought it.

Corel supposedly has a full suite but I have never checked them out.

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what is origami studio?

It’s a Facebook app to prototype UIs and interactions. It has a node approach (houdini, nuke) and I believe is Mac only.

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Neat.

I’m using Windows laptop and this is my toolbelt :smiley:

Defold - for game development
VS Code - for code editing (not all the time, sometimes I am pretty ok with just Defold :wink: )
Tiled - for tilemaps
Piskel - for pixel art drawing and animation
Audacity - simple sound manipulations
Tilesetter - used it few times for some fast tile sources
JuiceFX - used it few times to make grass/leaves animations
Pixel FX Designer - used it few times, but ended up with Defold’s particle system :wink:

Bonus (being used on mobile too):
Pixel Studio - for pixel sketches
Google Drive/Sheets/Slides/Notes and Docs for documenting anything
ArcWeave - dialogs (earlier I was using Twine)

There is also an irreplaceable Ezgif and Later websites that help me to schedule and make gifs on social media and Honeycam and OBS recorders :smiley:

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piskel is cool :slight_smile:

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One more tool I’ve been using recently (although I still need to integrate it properly with Defold) is this new map/level editor from one of the maker of Dead Cells

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Do you need to know Haxe to use it?

Emm…
For me, my budget is absolutely zero so I have to find creative ways to do things:

Defold - you know, this pretty kewl game engine
Musescore, Leshy SFMaker, and Polyphone (once in a while, LMMS) - music and sound effect generation
Audacity, TwistedWave, Online Convert - sound editing
Hecking MicroSoft Paint - Sprite generation (pixel art, I guess)
Paint Shop Pro 9 and Super Mario Bros. X - Things to do with making clear backgrounds and messing with alpha values that I can’t do in MS Paint
Krita - something I plan on using in the future
Google Docs and .txt documents - documentation and ideas and other funny things

I use a potato computer that has Windows 7 on it. :3

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Checkout piskel! [https://www.piskelapp.com/](https://www.piskelapp.com/)

Its free easy and can be online or downloaded free.

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Time to use piskel now~~

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Ive made a few hundred sprites on piskel and also used it for when teaching graphic arts to kids. I think youll love it.

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Daily:

  • Photoshop CS6: Painting for work or fun (games). Thank goodness I bought a CD when you still could.
  • Atom: Text editing. A bit bloated I’d say, but it works.
  • —Lite: (I wish) One of these days I will fork this and add multiple cursor support, at which point it would have all the features I need from atom…in < 3MB!
  • Git Bash: As a terminal and some git command line stuff.
  • git-gui: Most of my basic git usage. It’s not as pretty but has 90% of the features of other git GUIs, and it’s light enough that I can open and close it whenever I need it.
  • StrokesPlus (windows only :cry: ): Mouse gesture commands for my whole computer, any program, anytime. I mostly stick with the keyboard, but when I do use the mouse, this makes it 10x better. I never have to switch back-and-forth with the keyboard to do basic tasks: back, forward, new-tab, close-tab, minimize, maximize, close, switch-applications, etc.—all without clicking tiny buttons, for file browsing, web browsing, or whatever.
  • Pen & Paper: (the physical stuff I mean) All my brainstorming, code planning, diagrams, etc.
  • (unnamed): A tiny timer program I made that pops up and interrupts me every 20 minutes to remind me to look out the window for a bit and give my eyeballs a break. :expressionless:

Semi-Regularly:

  • Colorpicker: For normalized vector colors, RGB and HSV.
  • Multiviewer: For viewing a whole bunch of reference images at once. Was Defold, now Love2D.
  • Audacity: I really like it, though I don’t know how to do anything crazy. It makes sound editing feel like text editing to me. Select, cut, paste, delete, etc. The envelope tool is great for freeform volume editing.
  • Blender: Duh. For occasional game models, art mockups, rendering tests, or just fun.
  • Sketchup (a very old Google version): For me Blender’s a bit slow and imprecise for quick architectural mockups (or plans for real-life projects).
  • ScreenToGif: For quick and easy short game recordings (or bug reports).

Windows 7 For Life! :muscle:

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A fellow sketchup guy! Though their online and changes to pricing means I use an older version. VIACAD is very similar btw.

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What do you use Audacity for, and what don’t you like about it? (Aside from the Windows 3.1-looking gui…)

I never use Audacity, but only because I’m usually elbow-deep in some other more flexible DAW to begin with, no specific hate-on for it.

Depending on what you need to do, I might recommend www.ardour.org

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For my last game:

  • Defold
  • Inkscape
  • Audacity
  • Gimp - mostly for the promo graphics & background image modifications
  • Davinci Resolve - creating the trailer
  • OBS Studio - great for screen capture on PC
  • XRecorder (Android app) - Screen recorder for saving gameplay clips for social media or the trailer
  • Bitbucket - git hosting
  • VS Code - website & random JS projects. I really like it’s Git integration, so I do a lot of my commits & stuff in the UI. It makes committing small sections of a file so much easier than doing it via command line.
  • Google Keep - misc notes & task checklists

Future game:

  • Blender. I’m re-learning 3D modeling. Back in college I used Maya to build 3D cars for the free racing sim Racer, so it’s fun to dust off those skills. Blender was really hard to use at the time, but it’s really nice now.

Past game that I still maintain in LibGDX:

  • Android Studio
  • GDX Texture Packer
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Don’t want to repeat tools named already so I only add two to the list

DirOpus - a file manager, the file manager (any former Amiga users here?). I probably use less than 1% of it’s features but that’s so valuable to me already I’d have a hard time living without it.

Beyond Compare - fantastic source/file/folder comparison/merge tool.

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Yep yep yep, I’m that old. At the time use to have fun with Amos, SEUCK, Blitz basic etc.

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Do you run Atom as custom editor in Defold with ā€œ/Applications/Atom.app/Contents/MacOS/Atomā€? I tried it and Defold opens files in Atom but doesn’t activate Atom’s window for some reason.