I want to present a few tips here and I hope we can get the ball rolling and have people post things they've thought of over time that help streamline the development process. Tools to aid the art pipeline Building solid, easy to use tools that help the artists and models quickly prototype and test changes to art assets will decrease development time by orders of magnitude. Let's say Texture Artist has developed a new texture and he wants to see how it will look -- Several things you could consider trying is developing a Photoshop plug-in that uses the engine the display (while in Photoshop) what the texture will look like in the game. If that is not possible, make it as simple as possible to just look at the texture applied to Some Mesh. The more quickly you can prototype the better. The very same goes for 3D modelers and animators. Make a small app that uses the engine to display the mesh and allows the modeler to test anything he/she may need to see in order to make minor tweaks. Easy file back-up For a very quick and painless way to back-up art assets, source files, anything, I suggest using PKZip (command line) and use a batch file (or your operating system equivalent) and tell it to zip certain folders (you can select which file types to zip and which ones to skip). After that you can copy the files to another drive or system on the network. Design your game/engine to let you prototype and test changes quickly Command consoles and scripting are two examples of ways to let you open the game, jump to a certain level or map, and test changes and feature additions. This is very important and will save you a lot of time. If you design your game/engine right, you can allow yourself to change any variable at run time and test the changes. Can't stress how much that helps tweaking :) Last word: Little things that may take some time to develop in the beginning often save much more time in the long run when you remove redundant steps to execute a simple task. Anyone got anything they would like to share? [Edited by - cvg_james on January 4, 2006 3:14:14 PM]

Quote:Original post by OrangyTang
Tip 0: Use existing tools that other people have debugged for you if possible rather than writing your own.

The tools I described were really just wrappers around the engine that allowed the artist or modeler to quickly test changes to a texture or mesh in the engine environment. However yes, using solid, tested tools is absolutely good advice.

It depends on project. If you have several testing version (with different properties), and would like to work on all of them, creating few directories might be better idea.

Tip 1: Don't use C or C++. There are other languages which are worse to develop games in than C and C++, but chances are that if you use some other language you'll be using a language which is quicker and easier to develop in. Python, Java, and C# are all good choices.

Tip 2: Get as much done as quickly as possible... where "as much" is measured by your average Walmart-goer, NOT by a guy with an OOP fetish. Pretty pictures, surprisingly, are incredibly useful in focusing development.

Tip 3: Source control. CVS, Subversion, whatever. Even if it's just you working on it. Use it religiously. Backup your repository.