Dia: A free program to easily draw graphs (technology trees or diagalogues) -FreeMind: Free Mind Mapping Software. If you don’t know what mind mapping is I highly recommend you learn!
I just spent tonight’s dev session, 2 and 1/2 hours, creating two “old school” style bitmapped pixel-art fonts with 82 characters each.
If anyone happens to know of any bitmapped font utility that might be a cool thing to add to this list. I actually got two Windows fonts but had to clean up every one of the characters because at the font sizes of 12 and 8 with no anti-aliasing they were fairly distorted.
It is crazy how much time the graphics side of game development takes.
You can also check out Ciro (https://ciroapp.com). It’s a lightweight Agile alternative to JIRA/Asana. It’s task and tag based, which makes it really easy to keep track of individual tasks, sort them by priority/effort, and search for them later. For example, a tag can be a theme (ie. bug, feature, backend) or a part of your app (like Feature: Checkout), a status, or anything. Keyboard shortcuts are awesome, because you can create and search for tags really quick without using the mouse at all.
By the way how did Mixamo’s animations and Adobe Fuse charachter maker not get in this list?
MY art skills are absolute trash, but with Mixamo and Adobe Fuse I was able to create an athletic character that I needed in under 10 minutes, with no need to read docs or do tutorials. From all the art tools I’ve tried, Mixamo and Fuse impressed me the most with their simplicity but incredible power, all for free. Browsing the Mixamo Store, you can gets lots of animations and characters for free.
@Vanamerax PLEASE add Mixamo and Adobe Fuse to the list!
For sculpting Sculptris is great, Pixologic bought it but they keep it free, it supports automatic UV mapping, texture painting and poly reduction… i dont think that it would replace an entire pipeline, but the painted sculpts can be imported in Silo, Blender or 3D Coat for retopo, baking and rigging!
(I know 3D Coat is much better, but its also much more complicated)
I did this with it, and i’m not talented at all (never sculpted before)
3D I use Rhino3D since is powerful for making complex Ship, Cars boats and aeroplanes with much control of the surface. Also “Alias” that is different from Maya. Also Add “Zbrush Core” and “MayaLT”.
Add a section for version controll and add Unity services
Also a section for multiplayer and servers.?
Paper prototypes!
(Grabbed at random from this page.)
Joris Dormans’ Machinations Framework is an interesting and more formally theoretical way to model and analyze game mechanics. I recently learned about it from Ernest Adams’ and Joris Dormans’ very good Game Mechanics book.
There are also good resources for specific game genres, such as this list of blank card templates for card game design. BTW, you can use cards to prototype a lot more than just traditional card games. You can model most designs that include a mixture of data, randomness, and decision-making.
That’s great, I tried to use Loopy for prototyping game logic, but Machinations Framework looks more suitable for it. Thanx!
Have any ideas about testing?
I suppose it depends on what kind of testing. Although I haven’t used Dormans’ Machinations Framework yet, it looks like it could be good for numerical and systems balance testing. For idea testing, I think paper prototypes work great because you can see the testers’ expressions in person, and you can quickly change things in response to their feedback. For functionality testing, Unity Test Tools is actually pretty good.
Maybe others can suggest other testing tools for facilitating and tracking alpha and beta tests?
