A game development tool is a specialized software application that assists or facilitates the making of a computer or video game. Some tasks handled by tools include the conversion of assets (such as 3D models, textures, etc.) into formats required by the game, level editing and script compilation.
Almost all game development tools are developed by the developer custom for one game. Though tools may be re-used for later games, they almost always start out as a resource for a single game. While many COTS packages are used in the production of games—such as 3D packages like Maya and 3D Studio Max, graphic editors like Photoshop and IDEs like Microsoft Visual Studio—they are not considered solely game development tools since they have uses beyond game development.
The game tools may or may not be released along with the final game, depending on what the tool is used for. For contemporary games, it is common to include at least level editors with games that require them.
Famous quotes containing the words game, development and/or tool:
“My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say “I do not play bridge” is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn’t “at all a good player, in fact I’m perfectly rotten,” is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.”
—Bible: Hebrew Exodus 20:25.