Aloha, Azrael here!

I'm sure you are aware that making video games is hard. It's not enough to come up with solutions to problems you've never seen before, you also need to implement those solutions in the smoothest way possible! That's were tools come in!

Today I want to share the tools we use for Hope. This is part ONE of TWO ( we'll see). Here you'll see our tools for Game Design, Coding and Narrative:

• Google Docs: For Game Design Docs, Characters, Lore, and plot points.
  • It allows for seamless sharing and edits between our team. It's also free, which is the best price tag when working on a project which budget is only the time our adults lives allow for. 
• Google Sheets: for Mechanics, Plot beats and story frame work
  • You never know how use full a spread sheet is until you realize, it indeed is the best tool for... stories. This was funny the first time I came across it from seasoned game devs, but it truly is the simplest way to do a lot of different things.
• Unity Engine: our game engine of choice
  • One the most versatile game engines out there. It has loads of documentations and tutorials available making it smoother to learn. Wil and I have had some experience with it independently that made it an even better match for discussions and implementations. 
• Yarn Spinner: our dialogue add-on to Unity
  • It's a dialogue system that is in constant conversation with Unity :) We started using it for dialogue but now it’s one of the core pieces of our engine, and we have developed Yarn commands to manage camera, sounds effects and call C# methods and a lot more. We can do pretty much anything we need with it.
• Rider: for writing hardcore code
  • Although you can write C# code with pretty much anything (MonoDevelop, VisualStudioCode or even Notepad), Rider is so powerful, and has so many integrations with Unity, that make working with C# a breeze. 
• Visual Studio Code: for writing lame code
  • This is what I use to write dialogue nodes for using the yarn spinner language. 
• PolyNav2D: for walking
  • This one fixes one of those issues about 2D navigation that would have taken us months to solve and polish. It’s very simple and tiny but does a great job, so it was worth the bucks.
• Restream: For meetings and stream to YouTube
  • It's our newest tool. It's a streaming tool that makes it fast an easy to meet online and allow for interested people to watch our Office Hours live. You can watch us Wednesdays 5:30pm PST and Sundays 10:30 am PST in my YouTube Channel
• WhatsApp: for organizing and sharing thoughts
  • It's as good as any other communication app out there. This is just the one we all happen to have. 
• To-Do: to keep track of the tasks that need to be completed.
  • This is Wil’s Swiss Army knife for keeping our backlog, plan iterations, set reminders and share tasks with the rest of us.
• GitLab: Source Control
  • Keeping track of the changes you make to your project is vital for your sanity. Believe me, I've lost projects and it's painful. With Source Control, all you need to do is "save" your changes consistently and if there's an issue, go back to a previous save. It's Save Scumming for real life code! Priceless.

There are still a few more but we will leave them for another time. 

Is there anything here you use? 

Is there another tool that could do the job better? 

Let me know in the comments below!