My game development tools

Here's how I make my game development tools. They're optimized for me being a solo developer creating a relatively ambitious game on my spare time. Being alone means I have no time to waste on unnecessary stuff; on the other hand I have full control over the creative vision and can see how everything fits together easily. What the tools help with is letting me add much content to the game in little time, on the weekends after my dayjob when my brain is tired of thinking about complicated stuff and wants to be creative.

Creating the technology for the game and coming up with the idea for what the game should be are tasks that take lots of thinking and not so much doing, and these initial phases of development are meant to be surprising and unpredictable, so the tools I'm talking about work better at the later phases of development, where I have invented all the technology and decided on the game's general theme, and start adding lots of content (characters, houses, areas, events, dialogues, etc) to the game. This part of development can be systematized in a way that other parts often can't.

Part of what makes my tools work is that they're made for one person, and me specifically. This means you probably can't use the tools for your own project, but you can perhaps be inspired by the principles to create something that suits you. Both the tools and the principles won't probably work for bigger teams or even smaller ones, because they're not made for collaboration. Or who knows? I haven't tried.

To me, game development tools should be:

- Easy & fun to use
It's hard to get the right creative inspiration while struggling with frustrating technical problems. That's two parts of the mind that rarely work at the same time. So all technical stuff should be out of the way when creating, and nothing should feel like a slow time-consuming chore. You should see the result of what you do while you use the tool, and not program code or do any trial-and-error to make things work. There should be predefined categories for adding content so you don't have to think about the technical details behind how to add something. I have one function for adding a graphical detail at a position in the game world, and another function for adding a character that says a dialogue line when you talk to it. I can reuse these two functions over and over to create pretty much all fun content in the game, and having it this simple and predefined lets me focus on the fun stuff: the actual game world, characters, story and events.

The tools should not be slow or lag in any way, because that both gives me less time to create and makes it less inspirational to create.

- Simple
A simple system with few choices lets you create more efficiently. This is a similar idea to the last one, but is more directed towards being able to create more rather than having fun creating it. Instead of thinking about all possible details around how a house could look, a house in my game consists of 1x1x1 cubes organized in a grid, and then you choose one out of ten predefined textures to use and mix it with a color (a bit simplified description). So you only have to think about where the walls are and roughly how they look, not on what angles the walls should be, what decoration to add, how high the thresholds should be, how thick the walls should be, etc. Then if you want to change the look, you can change the wall's texture and/or color with a button click without having to rebuild any 3D model. It's faster to create a world in Minecraft or a Doom mod than an AAA game, because there are fewer things to think about, and the result doesn't necessarily become worse for that.

- Self-dependent
Instead of copying things between multiple different programs, like editing an image in an image editor and then exporting the result to a file and moving that file into the game, everything should be connected and all files should be in one place only. In my game development environment you can change size, rotation, color, etc of an image with one button click and it immediately changes inside the game. I also have a built-in image editor that lets me edit more advanced stuff without having to move the image back and forth between programs.

- Self-developed & self-hosted
You don't want to lay time on updating your tools or programs, or handling when they crash, or changing your workflow when an update changes how the program works. If you write the tools yourself, you're in control of what happens and the program won't ever change if you don't want it to. You don't need to be paranoid about your game development program potentially starting to go against their users who have invested years into the system, or anything like that.

- Specifically made for me
A program like Unity is made to suit a gigantic group of users and it has to provide functions and features to all of them. So all of the buttons in the program won't ever be used by one single person. If you instead create tools for your specific use case only, you get rid of all the unnecessary stuff that's in the way. You don't need a menu system anymore because all the buttons for the things you want to do now fit on the screen, and everything goes faster and is easier to find. The tools should also be made for what your specific use case is _right now_, so you can throw away stuff you don't need anymore. Now your tools won't grow bigger and more complex with the years, and you can always bring back old parts you threw away if you want to.

It's a challenge to come up with how your tools should work and then sit down and actually program them, but it's not way too time consuming, and as soon as you've used the tools for a while you quickly regain the time loss from having tools that let you create things more easily. I've made my tools work so well for me that the process of adding content into the game isn't what takes time anymore. That goes relatively fast, and now what takes time is thinking and coming up with all the ideas for what to add. To make sure I'm not just being productive and adding stuff without it being any good.

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