Development Tools

Any game is a massive undertaking that requires skilled creators and tools to do that creating. This is the list of tools I used for Fracterebus. It may not be what you want to use in the end, but I provided it in case it's helpful for you. Every single entry in this list is free, a fair few are open source, and all of them have license terms that I was comfortable using for the creation of a commercial game.

Core Development

Godot Engine

This is a game engine. It is a piece of software that handles a lot of the core requirements of what is needed to make a game. The alternate approach would have been making my own game engine from scratch (a task I have attempted with other projects, and ultimately failed at). I selected Godot because it is an excellent engine to work with and has a massive amount of community content available for learning how it works. It also supports my preferred programming language of C#. I also like that it's NOT a certain other game engine that has had massive licensing and fees issues in the past.

Visual Studio Community

This is a development IDE that most aspiring developers have probably at least heard of. I switched to this from Visual Studio Code after issues getting unit tests to work properly. Importantly, any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps. Pay closer attention to the license if you are part of any size company, it may not be usable for you without paying.

Visual Studio Code

I include this here because I did use it until I got frustrated with it. It may still be useful for you if you don't qualify for the free use of Visual Studio Community.

Notepad++

This is the single greatest text editing tool I've ever used and recommend it to anyone that wants a fast and light tool. For Fracterebus I used it to create tons of JSON files for configuration and an occasional web based tool.

Resource Creation

Aseprite

In a game designed with the pixel art visual style, you'll find you need to push around more pixels than you could even imagine. This is essentially the de facto pixel art editor. It's powerful for both still images and complex animations. Note that this tool is free only if you build it from source yourself. I supported the author by purchasing it through Steam which saves me from having to build the binary for myself and keeps me up to date automatically.

Audacity

Used for creating and modifying audio for both sound effects and background music. I am absolutely not a musically inclined person, but I can recognize a good tool when I use it.

Storefronts

Steam

The first target platform for Fracterebus is Windows PC through Steam. This choice was made because I am interested in the huge market it presents, and because exporting from Godot to Windows PC is built-in and straightforward. Steam also provides access to the growing Linux gaming community.

PlayStation

As a longtime fan of Sony's PlayStation consoles, this is my preferred console system. I hope to port Fracterebus to PlayStation with the help of a 3rd Party porting company that specializes in Godot console ports or through the use of middleware.

XBOX

This is Microsoft's storefront for their XBOX consoles.

Nintendo

This is Nintendo's storefront for their Switch consoles.

Documentation

Mantis Bug Tracker

A system for tracking development tasks and bugs. For those with other development experience, think of Jira or GitHub Issues. At the beginning of the project making tickets for everything proved to be more work than it was worth because I was constantly hopping between tasks and concepts. Later on in the project it was very helpful for keeping track of things I wanted to revisit.

MediaWiki

A wildly powerful wiki system that you're looking at right now. I needed a place to describe things to both the public and myself while I was figuring out the design of Fracterebus.

WordPress

Blogging software used for the development/news blog for Fracterebus. I never really found a theme I liked very much, but I also don't imagine a ton of traffic to a blog full of nerdy things.

NFO Servers

This is my web hosting provider. I've been administrating my own dedicated Linux server with them for over a decade and highly recommend them to anyone that needs a server. This server hosts the Wiki, Blog, Main Site, and Bug Tracker.

Internationalization

Google Gemini

There isn't an especially large amount of text in Fracterebus that requires internationalization, but it needs to be in as many languages as possible to improve the market size I have access to. After consideration of non-AI alternatives, I selected Gemini because it provided support for the internationalization I needed along with descriptions of why things were translated the way they were into various languages. Sorry to any consumers of locales besides en-US if the translation was strange.