What I Learned About Tools Development From Games Industry Legends

In this 2021 GDC Showcase session, Ubisoft's David Lightbown shares lessons from over 5 years of interviewing classic game tool creators, in order to help developers working on new game tools today.
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[@SeanMcYT]

Brilliant talk! Coming from a different industry, but working closely on delivering change there are definitely parallels! The challenge more often than not is re-educating people to come to you with problems rather than what they think are solutions. Your example of wanting a red NO button is BRILLIANT. Thank you.

[@rafael_madureira]

Great presentation. As a beginner game developer, this content is gold.

[@GameDesignThinking]

Great talk! Understanding the 'Why' of users is utterly important to know the 'What'.

[@hakimESC]

Great talk, that can be applied to many other industries

[@AFChannelX]

I agree :) nice talk!

[@vast634]

Whats really important about tools is also their data format, that they use for saving state and importing. Best ist to use some kind of storage format that is robust, and could be processed by another tool in the future. Using less convoluted binary formats, and rather well understood formats such as XML, JSON, TXT or common media formats like PNG, WAV etc. Or being linked to an SQL database. If a tool cannot provide a certain function to solve a specific problem, having an open (externally editable) format could solve this problem with manual edits. A closed binary format cannot be edited without a lot of effort.

[@SonicFan535]

It's great that these videos have subtitles available, but it would be nice if they were made with the captions feature instead of being embedded in the video so that people who find them distracting can toggle them off. They also contained a lot of mistakes in this video ("missed" instead of "Myst", "slowed axe" instead of "Slordax", "drama" instead of "DromEd", "bullying" instead of "Boolean", "torture" instead of "torch", etc.) which doesn't help the situation.

[@nyankrauss]

nice presentation, well balanced and clean, informative, interesting and also with funny subs :D boolean - bullying; torch - torture; Unreal Engine - in Real Engine XDD

[@RodrigoIsaas]

Nice talk!

[@FerdinandJosephFernandez]

16:36 ah yes of course, gotta have torture in the game, very important

[@EstrangedEstranged]

The torture may have something to do with the "classic bullying" at 16:20 (he meant "classic boolean") This is what happens when you edit auto-generated subtitles...

[@SamTheEnglishTeacher]

10:24 the talk actually gets on topic. At least I hope. This guy uses so many words to say so little.

[@juzzam3]

google's auto-caption was more accurate

[@TNothingFree]

I like talks about tools because they are so important however people tend to avoid the use of the term "work-flow". At the end we have a goal we want to reach, the question of "how" we do it is merely an implementation detail. Tools are implementation details in the grand scheme and sometimes even a tool that feels "natural" as he said in the talk isn't really efficient because people tend to settle with how things are done in certain way. Good talk, we need more discussions about tools.

[@Komagb]

The talk is great! But I REALLY wish I could turn off the hard-baked CC, very annoying.

[@GonziHere]

Really nice presentation, but I don't agree with the "test of time" argument. Even that example with the context menu - it's in place of click (great) and can be filled easily by the currently possible actions (great). But it also forces user to differentiate between the choices by a small vertical movement and don't get me started on disappearing by leaving the menu area... Which is why we sometimes see the radial menu - because the idea is to choose the direction (which is easier to control) and it's harder to leave the area altogether. Why don't we use it "everywhere" ? because we are already used to the worse method. But it's a solid argument for how dangerous it is to design something new "without care"... because your "proof of concept" will be used forever.

[@vux1247]

Neat

[@Tudvari]

Can someone suggest a good level editor for 2D games to have a look on? :D

[@GhostManZero]

You could try Tiled, it's a 2d tile map editor!

[@KlausWulfenbach]

Check out Super Mario Maker 2 if you haven't already. It's intended just to make Mario games, but it's one of the best of it's kind.

[@hakimESC]

@@ballswalls8189 stop that fkn spam

[@Tudvari]

@@GhostManZero Thanks, good idea!

[@Tudvari]

@@KlausWulfenbach Ohh, right, thanks, totally forgot about it! :)

[@dhruvatilak1987]

Really helpful

[@RugbugRedfern]

bruh you haven't even watched it

[@kverkagambo]

I guess, he means that tools live longer than individual game's development does.

[@zephaniahlaertn637]

Sir, I believe you and I both watched the same video. Have a good day!

[@DctrBread]

24:03 That's how things would work if we lived in a rational society

[@trudela5398]

Heh 10:22

[@SamTheEnglishTeacher]

Talk only useful if you've never made anything for anyone ever