What Small Tools Do You Find Most Useful During Game Development?

gamedev 3D Physics exploration game development

Started by JuniTech Monday at 6:59 PM 1 replies 200+ views

Original Post

Monday at 6:59 PM

When working on a game project, there are often small tasks that take more time than expected, such as calculating values, converting units, checking text, formatting data, or quickly testing something before adding it to the actual project.

I'm curious what kinds of small tools or utilities other game developers keep using during development. Do you prefer dedicated desktop tools, browser-based utilities, scripts, or features built directly into your engine?

What are some simple tools you find surprisingly useful in your everyday game development workflow?

bvanevery

Tuesday at 2:15 PM

A text editor that loads quickly is the only thing that comes to mind. It's the anti-IDE attitude towards things. Just browse the file system and open text files.

A fair amount of my game design takes place in analog, using a pen and a quad ruled engineering notebook. This gives my eye a break from computer screens, and my neck and back a break from the computer chair and other body cramping furniture.

To some extent I also use a ruler and a calculator, as I do get into 3D graphics and math stuff. If I was less cheap I'd buy a scientific calculator, but only very basic calculators are lying around the house. The need for a square root is common and they do have that function on them. If I ever need an inverse trigonometry function, I tend to pull up the digital scientific calculator on my computer to get the value. That's usually getting pretty far down into the weeds though and I probably didn't need to know it after all.