Collection of useful tools and resources for game development

[NikLever]

I’ve been working on an online app to create spritesheets and animations. Check it out at http://niklever.com/spritoon . Feedback appreciated.

[NikLever]

Anyone wanting to learn to code HTML5 games from first principles rather than relying on a specific library should take a look at the Udemy course I’ve just released. It is free using the link below. 

https://www.udemy.com/html5-game-development-beginner-to-pro/?couponCode=PROMOTE2018

 

[Dunce]

Hi There,

I decided to try and work with P2 physics and could not find a free tool to generate the JSON file for sprite shapes.
So... I created one

http://dunceware.com/Products/EasyPolygonMarker.aspx

See Quick Start Guide here: http://dunceware.com/Products/EasyPolygonMarker/QuickStart-EasyPolygonMarker.pdf

Please let me know what you think and if anything doesn't seem to work.

Thanks,
Morris

[robertbrooks]

I,ve built a little tool for cutting up Spritesheets into keyframes you can also use it preview spritesheet animations. It's got a handy little feature that will also allow you to trim the final frames as well as reduce the scale of the out put keyframes. If you're working with pixel art you can also toggle anti aliasing on and off. the tool is live and works in local so no uploading and downloading heavy png images. It works FAST!

check it out on my site https://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com/tools/spritesheet_slicer.php

 

another tool on my site, Something which a lot of us need to do is bulk rescaling of images. You're probably used to using irfranview or PS from the command line to do stuff like this but this little tool will handle it for you quicker than both of those. It also works in local so no uploading and downloading tons of images!  Here's the link

https://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com/tools/bulk_image_resizer.php

 

I spent ages making these tools If you find them useful I'd love to hear it!

 

 

[MarkSabier89]

On 9/18/2018 at 6:55 PM, Dunce said:

Hi There,

I decided to try and work with P2 physics and could not find a free tool to generate the JSON file for sprite shapes.
So... I created one

http://dunceware.com/Products/EasyPolygonMarker.aspx

http://dunceware.com/Images/EasyPolygonMarker/EasyPolygonMarker.png

See Quick Start Guide here: http://dunceware.com/Products/EasyPolygonMarker/QuickStart-EasyPolygonMarker.pdf

Please let me know what you think and if anything doesn't seem to work.

Thanks,
Morris

to be honest, your link did not open. I don’t understand why, though. Is there a problem with my device? Anyway, I would love to test this page.

[Beeandley]

Cool! I didn’t know about such useful resources. When I was updating my branded products, I decided to look for some new ideas. I went to the site https://masterbundles.com/sexy-font/ to consult on the development of my site. Thanks to the feedback, we have discussed every detail and I was satisfied. And we have implemented Grime Textures to bring more visitors to our site.

Edited July 26, 2021 by Beeandley

[Clint]

Hi there! 
I am not a professional coder or smth like that, but I have recently found great service for my level of skills - 0(lol)

Buildbox - simple 2d and 3d game development that does not require any technical skills. For me it sounds great

[markcora4567]

thanks for sharing a good information

[Olloverr]

The construction and choice of presentation design should also correspond to the traditional beliefs of the target audience.

 

[alexanderb]

You might find my CLI utility for creating sprites from random images useful. You need python, install it with pip install sprite-pipeline. Then use sp_group --style painting.png -W 100 -H 100 downloaded/ to get output.psd. Once you've adjusted the sprite sizes, use sp_pack to get a spritesheet and UV coordinates description.

[Pagan]

My web game stack. All this stuff is either free or very affordable:

react-three-fiber – State management + render loop + Three.js. Basically the foundation for any state-based 3D experience in the browser. 

Anyone doing WebGL without Three.js? I'd be curious to hear about your experiences. 

HTML/CSS – The GUI language of 3D browser games. 

Blender – Free, open, works everywhere, does everything, everyone uses it. Why not? What else would I use? Often I'm using Blender just for converting GLTF -> FBX and vice-versa, decimating, skinning, and so-on. 

Photopea – Free alternative to Photoshop that runs in a browser tab. As somebody who spent years learning that paradigm, I find just about every other pixel editing workflow to be limited in some way compared to the classic Photoshop experience. Photopea is great - just fully functional Photoshop "Classic", on demand.

Pagan Artifact – My own version control software that I created for game dev (particularly around diffing large files and binaries, an area git and GitHub fall short). It's also to protect IP, since GitHub is now allowing Copilot to go crazy on private repos.

Heroku – Simple, scalable app hosting. Pay only for what you use, scale easily in their UI with slider bars, simple CLI commands to deploy, managed SSL (https) and env vars. Build boilerplates for various modern languages like Node, Ruby, and Python. 

S3 – File storage.

MongoDB – High-availability game and user data, API caches and logs. 

Mixamo – Easily add mainstream animations to FBX models, like swimming, climbing ladders, etc. Very useful and free/open.  

Pixabay – Free, licensable assets. Everything from images to sound effects and full-length music tracks by a community of creators. Pixabay is like a creative toolbox full of snippets and inspiration. In the age of AI this kind of content is highly convertible to AAA quality production assets.

Meshy/Tripo – Interchangeable 3D asset generation AI services. Use whichever one you have more credits in, or whichever one is running a sale. All these providers are wrapping the same models, just make sure you choose "Smart Mesh" or "Smart Low Poly" for game-ready assets, otherwise you get extremely high poly meshes that you can't performantly raycast against or load alongside many other models. 

Singify/Suno/MusicGPT – Like 3D asset generation, largely interchangeable as they are all wrapping the same or similar models. These types of services can be used to fill in gaps between your custom music, or those you find on Pixabay and elsewhere. I typically find human created music to have more nuance and originality, but generative audio is nice when you need something highly specific (for humorous reasons, or otherwise). Something that would normally not justify the cost of hiring a musician to begin with. 

Typecast/Speechify – Like the aforementioned, interchangeable AI voiceover services that can help fill in gaps between custom voiceover work. I enjoy doing voiceover recordings, and find that it's generally a very easy thing to find help with (even people outside of games like doing it), but the AI services can come in handy with language translation especially for rarer languages that would be difficult to otherwise support, even for a well-funded studio. 

iMovie – Nothing special, nothing wonderful. It lets me cut and fade clips.

Pulsar – Free, open-source IDE. Microsoft acquired GitHub who made Atom (and Electron). Kinda funny they made all of Electron just to make a text editor run in JavaScript. Anyway, Microsoft ended up releasing VS Code which was great at first, but since they added Copilot I find it unusable. It's also gotten very bloated and slow, so I went back to Atom - except I didn't, because Atom is now gone, and the only fork that is still maintained is Pulsar.

Note what is largely missing from my product creation suite here is sales and marketing. Any ideas? How are people marketing their browser games in the absence of App Store or Steam discovery?