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The Toolsmiths

Thoughts on Tools Development

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"Remember, tools live longer than games do."

John Romero

reference: Gamasutra

"I think every company needs to make the decision to either invest significantly more in tools, or just not bother."

Tim Sweeney

reference: Gamasutra

Summary of the idea:

Evolution of software and interactions is like the natural evolution. If an interaction is difficult to use that software might not have as much success being adapted and being used by people and so it dies off. On the other hand, simple interactions from successful software will be used and evolved further.

David Lightbown

reference: YouTube

"When designing some feature (especially one with UI), I find that these can be useful questions to be asking: What widely-used software already does this kind of thing? What software does it really well? What does the state of the art look like?"

Jonathan Adamczewski

reference: Twitter

"Making one workflow work efficiently for everyone is highly unlikely, especially if you have thousands of users making many different kinds of games/prototypes/genres (Unity/Unreal). There is a middle ground here where sometimes giving options is a good thing, and sometimes not"

Robin-Yann Storm

reference: Twitter

"In the metaphorical game development gold rush, there are the devs out hunting for gold, and there are the people making shovels for them."

John Harris

reference: Gamasutra

"Git makes complicated things possible, but gives up making simple things easy."

Jason Batchkoff

reference: The Toolsmiths Discord

"The only time you know how to build a thing is the moment you finish building it."

Geoff Evans

reference: The Toolsmiths Discord

"You need to build a system three times - the first time you don't know what you actually need, it's an exploration, plan to throw it away - the second time you think you know what you need so you over-architect, it'll be too restrictive, plan to throw it away - the third time you build what actually works"

Nick Porcino

reference: The Toolsmiths Discord

"In general: only branch things that feed "the build". If you can't build it (you export from it) then don't branch it."

Geoff Evans

reference: The Toolsmiths Discord