What tools do you use when creating a game?

I finished the beginner tutorial and had a lot of fun modifying the little frog jumping through his world. Now I want to create my own game, but besides the code I need of course sprites and sounds. For the sounds I found a cool site: https://www.freesound.org/browse/
I wonder what tools do you use when creating a game? Photoshop? Spine (or a free alternative)? Do you make your own sounds? What are your sources, what are your tools? For what do you pay for?

For some great indie game dev resources, try out http://pixelprospector.com , as well as http://forums.indiegamer.com - these have been my staples for a while.

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As an alternative to Spine, you can use DragonBones (http://dragonbones.github.io) for creating animation. It’s open source, and not that hard to get the hang of. While Defold won’t import the spine json, you have lots of other export options. I just exported my animations as images, and made sprite flip books of them.

Edit: Forgot to mention Audacity(http://www.audacityteam.org/) for audio work. Awesome application. :slight_smile:

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There are a lot of different tools out there, free or otherwise. Pick one that seems feasible to learn and use (with respect to budget, complexity, tutorials etc.). Many developers have tried several tools before choosing “the one”, so don’t be afraid to experiment :slight_smile:

For instance, here is a great list of assets/tools:

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I am very impressed with Affinity Photo and Designer. So far only OS X but really serious contenders to (and MUCH cheaper than) Photoshop and Illustrator.

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Affinity designer is coming to windows which I am super excited about :slight_smile:

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Not just for creating a game but for entire business of game dev

Photoshop for painting, design, UI, compositing, some vector work
Scrivener for writing, note keeping
Inkscape / Sketch / Illustrator for vector work depending on what is being worked on and features needed
Hipchat for group chat
Dropbox for some file sharing, but Hipchat works great for smaller files / pictures for fast collaborative work too
Bitbucket + Sourcetree for git
Notepad++ / Sublime Text for editing some kinds of text… vim/emacs for other uses
Audacity / Audition for sound editing / converting formats… for have their unique usefulness
KDiff3 / WinMerge for file / folder comparisons
Greenshot for screenshots
Desk for customer support
BMTMicro / Itch.io for sales / delivery
PlayClaw / Fraps for screen recording
Inno Setup for building Windows installers
I used to use DMG Packager for making nice DMGs quickly and easily but it recently found the company seems to have died and my registration code now no longer works because the servers are down… hurray, DRM! Anyone have a suggestion for that?
Macroplant Adapter for some file conversions (audio/video)
Aseprite for pixel art (just started using it, used to use GraphicsGale but it’s much older and not updated in a long time)
iconverticons for quickly making various kinds of icon files based on a source png
Renderhjs Shoebox has some nice gamedev features just check it out and you’ll see if it’s useful to you or not
PNG Optimizer can be handy when every amount of file size counts
Google recently made all of these tools free https://www.google.com/nikcollection/

I also work platform agnostically. Some of the tools I only use on one OS.

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I would like to add a small tip, that unfortunately is OS X only. If you need basic screen recording, you can do that with Quicktime Player. You’re supposed to be able to record from an tethered iPhone or iPad to, put I’ve experienced that to be a bit flakey.

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you can use Camstudio for windows, if its set up correctly (its a very small and simple prgm) it will screen record direct to MP4 for you.

Also if you want to be able to capture 5 seconds worth and upload, https://gyazo.com/ will let you screen record and convert to a gif for you.

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I like this tool for making gifs from screen captures

And https://gfycat.com/ for hosting them

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