Uno reverse card to "Bbecaue remember: There's always a tradeoff. If you use free software, it's not always going to be as good as as a paid version." The opposite is also true. "Sometimes" the paid version is actually worse than the free one.
Rider works pretty well with Godot and c# btw. It works out of the box with debugging + code hinting. Still need to make a full game though so there might be problems somewhere in the complete flow.
For more than 10 years whenever I need to do light photo editing or graphic design I use GIMP. I don't know why it doesn't get more love. It's completely free, but the UI does look like a late 90's Photoshop that never got updated. There is a TON of information online on how to do anything you want in it. It uses layers. It can save as PSD or most image formats. However, in my experience it's also more *difficult* to accomplish simple tasks. Maybe it's just because I've used it infrequently and don't know all the shortcuts or proper ways to do things. In any case I used it for my current game project to do simple sprite design, and until I'm actually making money from games I'm likely to keep using it!
Thanks for the suggestion. I've been looking at LMMS on Mac as a potential tool for making music on my next game, but Music Maker might be a little more straightforward from the look of it.
@@ryanhill906 LMMS was very intuitive to learn for me, but I kept running into issues with the base plugins breaking when I tried to export music. It ended up having enough problems that I switched to REAPER - more obtuse off the bat, but a very powerful piece of software and it's free as long as you don't mind waiting four seconds every time you cold start it. Even paid it's only ~$70 USD though.
I actually use a lot Mind Meister to plan my ideas. It if it becomes too big, it might get a little overwhelming to look at, but it serves well for organization purposes and you can keep on expanding it as the ideas or details start comming in.
For UI, it's worth learning Illustrator (or a free alt), and a collab tool like Figma. Where Photoshop deals in pixels [raster art], Illustrator deals in math [vector art], which means it can be resized or output to any resolution without loss of quality. Great for key art & Store variants. Design collaboration tools are great for mocking up screens, sharing notes/comments, or even doing lightweight prototypes (2D).
3:35 I'm one of those people, but am transitioning. Am learning Git, and have some stuff on there. But you gotta understand, I grew up on google Drive. Also, a lot of my notes are on google Sheets. 99% of my game engine rn is notes on google sheets, as well as several projects. 9:25 Edit: I feel way better about my spreadsheet thing! I get flack for my obsession with it, and this validates me. ♥
Organization is more of a skillset than a "tool", but there are a ton of tools & aids that can help you organize everything about your project. + Ideas & research, + Assets & dev notes, + People/contacts you've met, + Deadlines & milestones, etc. Excel is a real workhorse - you can even get plugins for it (or Google Sheets) to link it to your other apps, or display info in alt ways. But whatever you use, it's super vital to get that stuff organized as early in your game-dev journey as possible, so you're not overwhelmed later. Even a small project can balloon quickly, if not well-managed.
@@dreamcatforgotten8435 Not a big Kanban-board person, I feel like it requires a lot of maintenance to remain useful. Visual frameworks like that - for me! - can hide some of the trickier notes/issues as well. I like a mix of text, image, and other sorts of docs, so wikis, spreadsheets, and ordinary file/folder organization works well for me. But everyone's different!
19 years in Games as an Environment Artist. I use Maya, blender, zbrush, substance painter and photoshop regularly…. But Affinty photo all the way, you dont need photoshop. Nice to learn for a job, not necessary at all for your own gamedev.
That "above and beyond" moment when I realize this is a CZcams channel I want to keep watching: 6:19 "There's a family photo that I want to get my ex edited out of"
" There's always a tradeoff. If you use free software, it's not always going to be as good as as a paid version. " well.. it is sometimes true, sometimes false
@@LeslieZAcoming from unity I spent about 2 months learning. BUT, I am now farther in progress rebuilding my game from scratch in Godot in 3 months, that I was in my 2 year long project I was working on in Unity. Godot has a MUCH better work flow, and once you stop trying to duplicate Unity with it it, it's so much more intuitive to use.
You can still use git, just not Github for free hosting. Then you will have to look into running something like Gitlab on your own infrastructure. Forge Industry is a git repo that is 45GB in size and it works perfectly on our own gitlab server. -M
@@bitemegames Thanks for reply. How much will it cost. We are from poor family background, it will be hard for us to spend tools. We are in search for free tools that we can use. PLEASE LET ME KNOW
@@Naveed22666 It does, it's not easy at all, but on steam, there's a dedicated audience for indie games and you can get them to care for your game while on mobile it's more of an uphill battle against the marketing budget of corporate titles. On steam, those are more distinct markets. On the GDC channel, there's a recent talk named "Identifying Indie: A Study of Who Plays What and Why" which is immensely valuable on how indie buyers find games and why they buy.
@@Naveed22666 you need marketing no matter what you are trying to sell. I think @sealsharp was just pointing out that you probably need a lot more marketing for a mobile game
Even with Steam it's hard, not as hard, but still hard. Last year, over 13.000 indie games were released on Steam. And don't forget, you need to pay $100 up front to publish there, and subsequently share 30% of your sales. Either way, marketing has become super essential, especially if you're just a small "no-name" dev. You don't necessarily need to spend money for it, but keep in mind that marketing on social media and other platforms like CZcams will eat away your time budget like crazy. It's a hard pill to swallow. If you don't market your game, no one will buy it, even if it's good. If you do marketing, you will definitely need to plan in a few more months for building up that community. Well, unless you spend money on a publisher, agency or influencer that does that for you...
Krita is definitely not an equivalent. I use Krita because some things are easier or feel better for what I commonly do versus in Photoshop (plus Adobe can go screw themselves), but there are some things that are incredibly obtuse or straight up function worse than in Photoshop. That being said, most of the issues with Krita tend to be actual photo editing in my experience, and GIMP picks up all that slack.
Nucleno is very useful for creating design documents. You get a lot of space in the free version but if you want to add more categories then you have to pay for premium.
Felt like I should give you some more resources: Steam announced this AI policy change back in January as I said: store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3862463747997849618?l=english This means that games that utilize AI in the development, have to disclose this, and then they're fine. An example of this is: store.steampowered.com/app/2676390/Nexus_Defenders (scroll down underneath "About this game", "AI Generated Content Disclosure"). However, to be honest, Steam seems to not really be enforcing it that much, as there are plenty of games that use AI for their capsule art for example, without disclosing any AI usage (if you've used AI, and take a look at the images, you can tell): - store.steampowered.com/app/2236300/Grand_Emprise_Time_Travel_Survival/ - store.steampowered.com/app/2402020/Dubai_Simulator/ - store.steampowered.com/app/2670630/Supermarket_Simulator/ -M
I'd differentiate. For example, using it for reference or to test ideas - as he mentioned as examples - I'd say it's fine. It's way easiert than googling for reference for half an hour, nad I'm not gonna call an actual artist for every dumb idea that pops up in my head immediately just to see if it could work or even remotely could look like the image in my head. But I'd keep it to references and brainstorming, for finished artworks n stuff I'd do it myself or find an actual artist still.
@@LucRio448 You could learn to make art yourself, like human beings have been doing for centuries. Further, like the youtube game and algorithm or not, but thumbnails are a core aspect of the video experience and one of the highest reasons new people will view a channel they arent familiar with. It cheapens the overall appearence of things and makes you wonder; well if thats AI, are the video ideas themselves? Video Titles? Scripts? They are clearly making games but now i have to wonder are they actually making art assetts themselves? Writing their own code or just generating it. These guys are clearly a full studio and make games to make money, no judgement, its a career and people gotta live. But core to game making is creativity and artistic expression. Even before getting into any copyright or artistic ethical concerns regarding AI, it just feels corporate and uninspired due to its crowd sampling nature. It is an immediate turnoff to any creative endeavor for me
@@JejuneCartoons You could learn to read, since you are seemingly able to write. I sadi reference and quick tests. I can throw a few words to an AI and get a rough idea what my random braind fart could look like in 5 minutes. Or I could take 2 hours to ge tsomething equivalent by drawing it myself. Now imagine just FOUR random ideas that you wanna test - congrats, now you filled an entire work day with crap, considering 20% at best are even worth persuing further, likely less, when you could do the same in 20 minutes. And THEN once you got an idea that you actually like , THEN you persue it further, either drawing it yourself or getting someone else to do it. Hell, did you even READ my initial response? I literally said SPECIFICALLY for what purposes I consider the use of AI to be fine and you are writing paragraphs telling me how it's not cool for ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THINGS. When I already said I agree with you except for those very specific things I mentioned, that you chose to ignore completely in favor of ranting about something I never even mentioned. Either you respond to my initial response by responding to what I actually said, or... idk, just edit your original comment if you wanna further elaborate on your original critique?
Don't forget Photopea. The web based Photoshop clone...FREE. And when I say clone...I mean clone.
dindt know about this one, tnks for sharing it
Yes and Cap Cut instead of Premiere Pro. 👍
Uno reverse card to "Bbecaue remember: There's always a tradeoff. If you use free software, it's not always going to be as good as as a paid version."
The opposite is also true. "Sometimes" the paid version is actually worse than the free one.
Yeah but in case of gamedev relevant software its almost always the case with freeware rather than software that costs.
Who else looked up at the computer when he started talking about discord and it made the beep sound 🤣🤣
I like videos like this as a sanity check for my own development 😅. Glad we're pretty much in agreement about most of this stuff.
Rider works pretty well with Godot and c# btw. It works out of the box with debugging + code hinting. Still need to make a full game though so there might be problems somewhere in the complete flow.
Five Free Tools for Game Devs
1. Pushups
2. Squats
3. Pullups
4. Burpees
5. Trains
Yes but it will only work if you've got white shirts ... lots and lots of white shirts .... and 1 black.
indiedevs will do literally anything except finish their game lol
Aw hell naw. First three sure, burpees never served any purpose for me. Add weights and swimming.
Yeah, Saitama training!
Unless you're going to be making an isometric game, then you'd probably want to add Planks and Horse Stance to the list.
For more than 10 years whenever I need to do light photo editing or graphic design I use GIMP. I don't know why it doesn't get more love. It's completely free, but the UI does look like a late 90's Photoshop that never got updated. There is a TON of information online on how to do anything you want in it. It uses layers. It can save as PSD or most image formats. However, in my experience it's also more *difficult* to accomplish simple tasks. Maybe it's just because I've used it infrequently and don't know all the shortcuts or proper ways to do things. In any case I used it for my current game project to do simple sprite design, and until I'm actually making money from games I'm likely to keep using it!
i did a find somewhere last year 'Cascadeur' i think your going to find it interesting, it's a 3d animation ai tool.
Discord is great. I manage our mastermind group in discord. Using channels and pins as bookmarks to resources and knowledge.
Affinity Desiner and Photo as commerical, or Krita as free, alts to Photoshop and Illustrator are great.
Krita is good as well
If you make your own music you need a DAW like Garage Band or ProLogic. I actually use Magix Music Maker.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've been looking at LMMS on Mac as a potential tool for making music on my next game, but Music Maker might be a little more straightforward from the look of it.
@@ryanhill906 LMMS was very intuitive to learn for me, but I kept running into issues with the base plugins breaking when I tried to export music. It ended up having enough problems that I switched to REAPER - more obtuse off the bat, but a very powerful piece of software and it's free as long as you don't mind waiting four seconds every time you cold start it. Even paid it's only ~$70 USD though.
I actually use a lot Mind Meister to plan my ideas. It if it becomes too big, it might get a little overwhelming to look at, but it serves well for organization purposes and you can keep on expanding it as the ideas or details start comming in.
For audio I use and recommend Reaper.
Cool Edit Pro 2.1
Opens video then clicks Like. I might be biased.
For UI, it's worth learning Illustrator (or a free alt), and a collab tool like Figma. Where Photoshop deals in pixels [raster art], Illustrator deals in math [vector art], which means it can be resized or output to any resolution without loss of quality. Great for key art & Store variants.
Design collaboration tools are great for mocking up screens, sharing notes/comments, or even doing lightweight prototypes (2D).
3:35 I'm one of those people, but am transitioning. Am learning Git, and have some stuff on there.
But you gotta understand, I grew up on google Drive. Also, a lot of my notes are on google Sheets. 99% of my game engine rn is notes on google sheets, as well as several projects.
9:25 Edit: I feel way better about my spreadsheet thing! I get flack for my obsession with it, and this validates me. ♥
Organization is more of a skillset than a "tool", but there are a ton of tools & aids that can help you organize everything about your project. + Ideas & research,
+ Assets & dev notes,
+ People/contacts you've met,
+ Deadlines & milestones, etc.
Excel is a real workhorse - you can even get plugins for it (or Google Sheets) to link it to your other apps, or display info in alt ways.
But whatever you use, it's super vital to get that stuff organized as early in your game-dev journey as possible, so you're not overwhelmed later. Even a small project can balloon quickly, if not well-managed.
Trello and Miro combo works wonders for a lot of scenarios.
Trello for tracking Task statuses, and Miro for Flow and State charts, notes, etc.
@@dreamcatforgotten8435 Not a big Kanban-board person, I feel like it requires a lot of maintenance to remain useful. Visual frameworks like that - for me! - can hide some of the trickier notes/issues as well. I like a mix of text, image, and other sorts of docs, so wikis, spreadsheets, and ordinary file/folder organization works well for me. But everyone's different!
19 years in Games as an Environment Artist. I use Maya, blender, zbrush, substance painter and photoshop regularly…. But Affinty photo all the way, you dont need photoshop. Nice to learn for a job, not necessary at all for your own gamedev.
I didn't even know Rider can convert breakpoints to pause points and I use it for more than 2 years.
Thanks
I could use a video on Rider
That "above and beyond" moment when I realize this is a CZcams channel I want to keep watching: 6:19 "There's a family photo that I want to get my ex edited out of"
" There's always a tradeoff. If you use free software, it's not always going to be as good as as a paid version. " well.. it is sometimes true, sometimes false
No way! I use a browser too!!!
pro tip newer versions of audacity have a dark theme: edit > preferences > interface > theme which looks much more modern.
VS Code is free and has a great Unity extension
It takes like 2 months to learn Godot. Just do it!
Nah, it is easier than that. You can just jump in and start building if experienced with Uniity for example. Learn while makiing game.
@@LeslieZAcoming from unity I spent about 2 months learning. BUT, I am now farther in progress rebuilding my game from scratch in Godot in 3 months, that I was in my 2 year long project I was working on in Unity. Godot has a MUCH better work flow, and once you stop trying to duplicate Unity with it it, it's so much more intuitive to use.
I don't see a ring, he's not married yet LADIES
When the project size is big, like 5GB or more, then we cannot use git.
Any good alternatives to collaborate? We are struggling.
Please help.
You can still use git, just not Github for free hosting. Then you will have to look into running something like Gitlab on your own infrastructure. Forge Industry is a git repo that is 45GB in size and it works perfectly on our own gitlab server. -M
@@bitemegames Thanks for reply.
How much will it cost.
We are from poor family background, it will be hard for us to spend tools. We are in search for free tools that we can use.
PLEASE LET ME KNOW
I am currently using PlasticSCM. It handles big files and projects well. It get's the job done for me !!
That is, you have a blender that is absolutely free and you have not purchased any addon for it?
GIMP gang - opensource photoshop
Hi I am a new Solo Game Developer. Should I publish a mobile game or Steam game? Which is more likely to be profitable and worth getting deeper in?
Mobile is generally considered not worth it if you don't have the marketing budget to enforce a hype.
@@sealsharp Oh Thanks!
So does publishing games on Steam not require a lot of marketing?
@@Naveed22666 It does, it's not easy at all, but on steam, there's a dedicated audience for indie games and you can get them to care for your game while on mobile it's more of an uphill battle against the marketing budget of corporate titles.
On steam, those are more distinct markets. On the GDC channel, there's a recent talk named "Identifying Indie: A Study of Who Plays What and Why" which is immensely valuable on how indie buyers find games and why they buy.
@@Naveed22666 you need marketing no matter what you are trying to sell. I think @sealsharp was just pointing out that you probably need a lot more marketing for a mobile game
Even with Steam it's hard, not as hard, but still hard. Last year, over 13.000 indie games were released on Steam. And don't forget, you need to pay $100 up front to publish there, and subsequently share 30% of your sales.
Either way, marketing has become super essential, especially if you're just a small "no-name" dev. You don't necessarily need to spend money for it, but keep in mind that marketing on social media and other platforms like CZcams will eat away your time budget like crazy.
It's a hard pill to swallow. If you don't market your game, no one will buy it, even if it's good. If you do marketing, you will definitely need to plan in a few more months for building up that community. Well, unless you spend money on a publisher, agency or influencer that does that for you...
Krita is close to Photoshop I believe. It's open source and free.
Close in which way? ^^
@@hound_of_justice Functionalities offered and how good of a graphic editor it is.
Krita is definitely not an equivalent. I use Krita because some things are easier or feel better for what I commonly do versus in Photoshop (plus Adobe can go screw themselves), but there are some things that are incredibly obtuse or straight up function worse than in Photoshop. That being said, most of the issues with Krita tend to be actual photo editing in my experience, and GIMP picks up all that slack.
Soon AI will make humans obsolete for computer applications.
Nucleno is very useful for creating design documents. You get a lot of space in the free version but if you want to add more categories then you have to pay for premium.
I'll be curious on the AI topic. Since Steam says no AI is allowed. But even photoshop has AI in their brushes.
Steam has changed their policy to allow for AI to be used since January 2024 -M
@@bitemegames Ooh? Damn I need to reevaluate everything then.
Felt like I should give you some more resources:
Steam announced this AI policy change back in January as I said: store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/3862463747997849618?l=english
This means that games that utilize AI in the development, have to disclose this, and then they're fine. An example of this is: store.steampowered.com/app/2676390/Nexus_Defenders (scroll down underneath "About this game", "AI Generated Content Disclosure").
However, to be honest, Steam seems to not really be enforcing it that much, as there are plenty of games that use AI for their capsule art for example, without disclosing any AI usage (if you've used AI, and take a look at the images, you can tell):
- store.steampowered.com/app/2236300/Grand_Emprise_Time_Travel_Survival/
- store.steampowered.com/app/2402020/Dubai_Simulator/
- store.steampowered.com/app/2670630/Supermarket_Simulator/
-M
4:37 : "..Kind of cancelled.." Well.. this will be a really bad desesion if you don't release it. :(
Great ✨✨ 👍🍉🤣
Companies need to be careful about NOT sponsoring this guy.
eh? -M
1. Japanese
2. Fountain
3. Girls
4. Dating
5. Sim
Very disappointed to hear you guys are using AI regularly.
It's a tool .
I'd differentiate. For example, using it for reference or to test ideas - as he mentioned as examples - I'd say it's fine. It's way easiert than googling for reference for half an hour, nad I'm not gonna call an actual artist for every dumb idea that pops up in my head immediately just to see if it could work or even remotely could look like the image in my head. But I'd keep it to references and brainstorming, for finished artworks n stuff I'd do it myself or find an actual artist still.
@@LucRio448 You could learn to make art yourself, like human beings have been doing for centuries.
Further, like the youtube game and algorithm or not, but thumbnails are a core aspect of the video experience and one of the highest reasons new people will view a channel they arent familiar with.
It cheapens the overall appearence of things and makes you wonder; well if thats AI, are the video ideas themselves? Video Titles? Scripts? They are clearly making games but now i have to wonder are they actually making art assetts themselves? Writing their own code or just generating it.
These guys are clearly a full studio and make games to make money, no judgement, its a career and people gotta live. But core to game making is creativity and artistic expression. Even before getting into any copyright or artistic ethical concerns regarding AI, it just feels corporate and uninspired due to its crowd sampling nature. It is an immediate turnoff to any creative endeavor for me
@@JejuneCartoons You could learn to read, since you are seemingly able to write. I sadi reference and quick tests. I can throw a few words to an AI and get a rough idea what my random braind fart could look like in 5 minutes. Or I could take 2 hours to ge tsomething equivalent by drawing it myself. Now imagine just FOUR random ideas that you wanna test - congrats, now you filled an entire work day with crap, considering 20% at best are even worth persuing further, likely less, when you could do the same in 20 minutes. And THEN once you got an idea that you actually like , THEN you persue it further, either drawing it yourself or getting someone else to do it.
Hell, did you even READ my initial response? I literally said SPECIFICALLY for what purposes I consider the use of AI to be fine and you are writing paragraphs telling me how it's not cool for ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THINGS. When I already said I agree with you except for those very specific things I mentioned, that you chose to ignore completely in favor of ranting about something I never even mentioned. Either you respond to my initial response by responding to what I actually said, or... idk, just edit your original comment if you wanna further elaborate on your original critique?
@JejuneCartoons you could plant and harvest all your food. I'm disappointed at you for going to grocery stores.