Tips for solo game developers.

1

OpenGameArt.org

Use assets from asset stores at least for mockup, if nothing else. Even big studios will take assets like nature, terrain or some generic props to fill their game. There are thousands of free ones in unity and unreal asset stores and then you also have places like opengameart. I can share more places for anyone interested. As solo developers our time is limited and there is no reason to wast 5 days working on ground textures when you can get professional ones for free example. Yes, maybe you want to learn how to do that, but why not to compare your work to something already made by others. Yes, you maybe want to make your game unique, but why not taking existing model and editing it a bit to match your art vision. Save time where you can, you can always return back and rework those assets.

#Online Services #Photos & Graphics #Image Marketplace 239 social mentions

2

Git Large File Storage

Use subversion. There are many options out there but I prefer standard git hosted on Azure Devops it is free and it has unlimited storage space. If your project is larger that few GB-s you want to enable GIT LFS also. Why is subversion here if you are solo dev? It allows you to mess up your project while experimenting and to go back. It is soft backup for your project. It let's you to go back into past and compare your project to see all the progress that you made. Maybe one day you will include more people and you will be ready for that, I can go on with reasons. If you are not using any kind of subversion and you spent on project more that few weeks, start using it, trust me.

#Git #Development #Code Collaboration 100 social mentions

3

Azure DevOps

Use subversion. There are many options out there but I prefer standard git hosted on Azure Devops it is free and it has unlimited storage space. If your project is larger that few GB-s you want to enable GIT LFS also. Why is subversion here if you are solo dev? It allows you to mess up your project while experimenting and to go back. It is soft backup for your project. It let's you to go back into past and compare your project to see all the progress that you made. Maybe one day you will include more people and you will be ready for that, I can go on with reasons. If you are not using any kind of subversion and you spent on project more that few weeks, start using it, trust me.

#Code Collaboration #Continuous Integration #Git 94 social mentions

4

Game-Icons

Well for Unity you have over 500 free assets with 3D art in asset store here, then you have a huge list of other links here, some are 2D. Check out also free templates, lot of them give you their 2D art to use for free example, other example. I assume other popular engines have similar lists. I mentioned OpenArt.org. Oh, Here is an nice website to generate bunch of 2D icons for free. Then you have a lot of free images here and here.

#Web Icons #Icon Fonts #Vector Icons 194 social mentions

5

SQLite

I started using Fossil for my new projects this year, mostly just to try something new, but it's really nice. It is simpler than git and comes with a built-in web-GUI for tracking issues and a built-in wiki and ways to publish files. It is made by the people behind Sqlite and it is what you see on https://sqlite.org/index.html (and on https://www.fossil-scm.org/). It is made for small teams working on small projects, and it seems to work for me. I still use git for all my old repos and in my dayjob and I still like that, but fossil seems more scaled for my solo-projects so will probably keep using that (and learn more how to use it beyond the basics).

#Databases #Relational Databases #NoSQL Databases 18 social mentions