Game Dev Chronicles: Tools of the Trade

So…I’ve been working on my own game. When you work on a game by yourself, you need to wear many hats. You need to be a game designer, producer, programmer, audio engineer and artist. Each job has their own tools to accomplish their needs. While I’m not ready to share the game yet, I wanted to talk about the tools I’m using.

With my background in programming, my first decision was the framework for the game. There are many great frameworks out there and they have their own strengths. For my first outing I’m making a 2D game, preferably an arcade style mobile game. I chose Gamemaker for their ease of jumping in as their GML language feels a lot like Javascript, which I’m pretty familiar with. Gamemeaker can publish to multiple platforms such as PC and iOS. Notable games made with Gamemaker are Hotline Miami, Hyper Light Drifter and Undertale. So far my experience has been great. Managing objects and events has been easy. I’m leaning on my programming background to optimize and manage state. There have been great tutorials online from Gamemaker and Shaun Spalding which have jump started my time in the framework.

Any good project using code should use version control. Git and GitHub are my tools of choice. Github doesn’t quite recognize all Gamemaker files so batting a .gitattribues file with the following line helps clean up the dashboard of the type of files

*.yy linguist-language=GML

After coding out the game for a while, I realized I was missing something. As an Engineering Manager, I’ve used project management tools to help guide the teams on the work they were doing. I was missing the same thing from my project. Once again, there are many tools out there. GitHub has a kanban board. Trello has been pretty useful too. I chose Notion as my project management tool as it has multiple ways to manage information. I created a kanban board but also there are document types to manage documentation. So far this has been working well but definitely needed some setup.

You can’t make a game without artwork. I mean, you can, if your game is a text-based adventure. In my game, you are not likely to be eaten by a Grue, so I needed some art. Gamemaker does a decent job with sprite management and there are some tools for sprite editing. I felt I hit some limits there and fell back on my old graphic design background. Photopea is a great, free, online photo editor like Photoshop. I tried Gimp, but Photopea works so much like Photoshop that it was easy to pick up and get going. This has been great to do initial designs.

As the game I’m working on is 2D, I need sprites. Sprites are the files used in the game for everything such as players, enemies and items. Gamemaker allows for animated sprites which can use multiple frames. Animation helps bring game characters to life. They make the world feel alive. As I said before, I worked within Gamemaker’s sprite tools but found I needed a bit more. I was pointed to a paid tool call Aseprite. Sprite is a sprite image editor with more advanced editing tools and animation helpers. You can export finished sprites to files which Gamemaker can import.

Lastly, adding audio to the game added something I didn’t think about. As soon as I added sounds to the game, it gave it depth. It brought the game life that it didn’t have before. To do this, I used Audacity, a free audio editing tool, to clean up, fade in/out, shorten or compress free commercial-use sounds. Gamemaker has some control here as well with fading in/out sounds and adjusting gain.

There are many great tools out there for game development. I hope to explore more as my game dev journey continues. Tools are just tools and you are ultimately the most important part. As with any tool, “you only get out of it what you put into it.”