The toolbox

Game Dev Tools

Everything I actually use to make and ship games, by stage. A few are things I built myself because nothing did the job. No affiliate links, no sponsors – if it’s here, it’s because I open it.

Engine & Code

  • Unity – Every game I’ve shipped. I keep a personal template project with audio, save/load, skill trees, tooltips and event channels already wired up so a new prototype starts on day one, not week two.
  • Easy Save 3 – Save/load without writing a serialiser. Handles the awkward types and encrypts saves so the achievement hunters can’t just edit a text file. Great asset and well worth it to get saving data working fast.
  • VS Community – The IDE I use.
  • Git – Version control. Commit before every scary refactor.

Art

  • Aseprite – Pixel art and animation. All the sprites in Working Class Monsters and Food Delivery Simulator came out of this.
  • Blockbench – Low-poly 3D modelling that thinks like a pixel art tool. I have Blender experience, but I’m crap at 3D and this simplifies it enough when I want to try out some modeling.
  • Lospec palettes – Pick a palette before drawing anything. Saves hours of muddy colour decisions.

Audio

  • 1BITDRAGON – Music maker built for people who aren’t musicians. I don’t know a thing about making tracks but this is an AMAZING tool for getting music sorted for your game.
  • Audacity – Trimming, normalising and the occasional hacked-together sound effect.
  • Freesound – Creative Commons sound library.

Capture & Content

  • Unity Recorder – Records gameplay straight out of the editor at a fixed frame rate, so trailers and GIFs don’t stutter.
  • OBS – Longer recordings and anything that isn’t inside Unity.
  • GIF Converted made by me – Turns a clip into a Steam-sized GIF without the quality falling apart. Free on itch. I also have a paid premium version that gives you:

    – Batch gif conversion
    – Target file size fitting (perfect for Discord, Twitter, Reddit)
    – Trim timeline with live video preview
    – Screenshot extraction from videos

    It’s a Windows app, so lives local and can get you GIF/PNG media for your game marketing fast and easily.

Steam & Marketing

  • Steam Capsule Preview made by me – Drop in your capsule art and see it at Steam’s real sizes next to real games: search results, front page tabs, wishlist, library. Runs in your browser, nothing uploaded.
  • Steam Lens made by me – Paste a Steam link, get the score and recent trend, what players keep praising and complaining about, rough sales estimates, and how it stacks up against the biggest games on the same tags. Public data, plain statistics, and a short AI-written verdict on top.
  • Steamworks – Store page, builds, achievements, wishlists. Where every launch actually happens.
  • Gamalytic – Sales and player estimates for any Steam game. Handy for checking whether a genre actually sells before building in it.
  • SteamDB – Follower counts, price history, tags. The other half of doing your homework on a genre.
  • Steam Review Scraper made by me – Pulls every review for a game into a spreadsheet so you can read what players actually complain about.

Planning & Notes

  • Obsidian – Design docs, play notes, feel logs, the lot. Plain markdown files, so nothing is locked in.
  • Syncthing – Keeps the Obsidian vault in sync across PC, laptop and phone without a subscription.

AI

  • Claude Code – Writes and refactors Unity code from a written brief with pass criteria. AI Coding assistance is useful if you know what you’re doing & how to use it efficiently. If you have no coding experience, I’d learn the basics first at least before handing Claude the reins.

Learning

  • How to Market a Game – Chris Zukowski’s blog and course. The most useful thing I’ve read on Steam, wishlists and why some games sell.
  • GDC Vault – The free talks are enough. Search for post-mortems in your genre.
  • My Blog Made by Me – I post my Game design / dev related findings from my indie dev journey. I try my best to keep the language simple, in terms that anyone can grasp.

    I focus on analyzing the fun found in games. Not just ticking boxes “because genre X requires feature Y”.

    Games are all about fun after all, right?