Before listing some of the most productive tools for game developers, lets’ see why you need to integrate them into your working assets. Without any doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on every industry around the globe, and gaming is no exception. As there are two sides to every coin, the gaming industry was fortunate to see positive effects from the pandemic and has boomed as people faced multiple lockdowns and social distancing rules all over the globe. So they started looking for ways to spend their time when they can’t venture outside and playing was the one that won the race. Therefore, it’s no wonder that the gaming industry generated revenues of more than $180 billion in 2021, up +1.4% over last 2020.

What does it mean for you as a game developer? On one side, you have more market opportunities and by localization, you can expand on the new markets and find new customers who are willing to play your game. On the other side, this means more work and usually, developers don’t have it easy.

Often, they are the heart of a project, especially when it comes to creating and localizing games. And this is a challenging and responsible job, that may include research, design, programming, and testing games and their adapted versions.

As a developer, you are always busy and need to stay focused if you don’t want to make any mistakes. Otherwise, you can easily get your productivity out of control, with all the tasks, data, and deadlines.

However, there are thousands of apps and services that can easily save your day and make your work faster, easier, and more efficient. But figuring out which are best can be tricky and difficult.

Therefore, we compiled a list of 20 time-saving tools for game developers. You can easily implement them into your work regardless of your level of expertise or whether you work alone or in a team. They will make your work easier, give you peace of mind, and will allow you to stay organized.

Advertising and Marketing Tools

Adjust

tools for game developers - Adjust

Adjust is the mobile marketing platform that will help you to grow your game. It has multiple tools that you can use to find how players reach your game, simplify your marketing. and earn your customer trust with rigorous data protections that adhere to the world’s most stringent privacy regulations.

This way, you can better understand what motivates your end-users at every point in their journey and optimize your campaigns based on accurate and high-quality data.

Price: free up to 1.500 monthly attributions
Supports: all major platforms

TopOn

tools for game developers - TopOn

TopOn lets you connect with platforms like Facebook and UnityAds so you can advertise your game in different formats and attract more users. With Intelligent Aggregation Management Tool, you can do A/B tests and get insight into how your adverts are performing. This way you can optimize your strategies and improve your revenues.

Price: customizable
Supports: iOS, Android, Unity, Cocos, Adobe Air

Unity Ads

tools for game developers - Unity

Unity Ads is a game engine and a market-leading mobile ad platform focused on showing content across platforms and games. A diverse ad supply, advanced targeting tools, insightful analytics, and self-serve dashboards help you manage your campaigns and profitably scale your game or app.

Unity charges you based on the number of impressions your campaign receives. In making cross-promotion, you are paid only when users install the advertiser’s game. That means that showing the ad in the right place, at the right time, without breaking a player’s game flow, will you’ll get more revenue than showing too many ads.

Price: $0
Supports: all major platforms

Analytics and Error Logging Tools for Game Developers

GameAnalytics

tools for game developers - GameAnalytics

GameAnalytics is a free tool developed by game developers for game developers, that includes analytical tools. Its suite of features lets you analyze player behavior, improve user engagement, and advertise and monetize your app to the best. It analyzes your game application on 50 different matrices for real-time insights. You can set it up in just a few minutes, with SDKs for every major platform and engine.

Price: $0
Supports: all major platforms

Firebase Crashlytics

Crushlytics is a real-time crash reporting tool that helps you prioritize and fix your most pervasive game crashes based on the impact on real users. This way, you can have loyal players and increase their engagement.

Crashlytics offers you this advantage by actively dealing with all sorts of issues even before your support team is filled with a flood of tickets. To make all the processes easier for you, the platform works seamlessly with tools for bug tracking and project management like Slack, Jira, and more.

Price: free to start
Supports: Android, iOS, Unity

Benchmarks+

Brought to you by GameAnalytics, Benchmarks+ shows you what’s happening in the industry and what the trends are. Moreover, you can get real-world aggregated data on how players are behaving and what genres they are playing.

If you care about retention, engagement, or monetization, Benchmaks+ has you covered with all the core metrics you need. In addition, with pre-aggregated metrics for all App Store gaming categories, and more than 80 additional sub-genres, you can hone in on the types of games that actually matter to you.

Price: starting with $375/month
Supports: all major platforms

GameRefinery

With a market characterized by increasing competition, GameRefinery is a tool that you can’t afford to miss, as it’s helping you be ahead of your competition and stand out from the crowd.

With up-to-date intelligence on market feature trends and industry-leading feature level analytics, you can figure out what’s hot and what’s not in the gaming industry and stay competitive.

By using GameRefinery you can go deeper than just performance metrics and see the genres and functionalities driving revenue, while the player demographics insights help you to find, know, and engage your audience. This way, you can develop and implement the best strategies for individual titles or for your portfolio, no matter if you are a developer or a publisher.

Price: $0 for the basic plan
Supports: all major platforms.

AppTopia

Even if AppTopia is not specifically created as one of the tools for game developers, you can use it to find out how your game is performing, track your competition, benchmark your game against the industry, monitor every move your competitors make, and use the insights to make better decisions.

Price: starting with $2,000/month
Supports: all major platforms

Collaboration, Workflow & Project Management

GameFlow

GameFlow is a mold-breaking visual scripting and automation tool designed to be easy to use and to simplify your game development. By using it, you can create complex game logic, interactions, and effects in a visual editor, without even writing a single line of code. It brings powerful time-saving features to your development, including macros and keyboard shortcuts to automate tedious tasks.

Price: $0
Supports: Unity

Trello

Trello is one of the great project management tools for game developers that provides you with simple solutions for defining and tracking projects. Through a digital dashboard, you can create and arrange various tasks for yourself and other team members.

Besides, it easily integrates with a variety of platforms and has its own iOS and Android app! One of the most interesting features is the possibility to start tracking your project on the desktop and ending it on your phone.

Price: $0 for the basic plan
Supports: all major platforms

HacknPlan

tools for game developers - HacknPlan

HacknPlan is a unique SaaS game production tool that brings together game design documentation and project management to provide a semantic way of organizing, planning, and tracking the progress of your game. Taking into consideration the specific needs the game developers might have, HacknPlan focuses on simplifying the processes including many different moving parts. This could be the best option for you if you’re struggling to unify and collaborate across several different projects and teams.

Price: $0 for the basic plan
Supports: all major platforms

Engagement and retention Tools For Game Developers

Twitch

tools for game developers - Twitch

With over 2 million active streamers in December 2021, 2.2 – 3.2 million monthly broadcasters, and 100 million monthly viewers, Twitch is the world’s leading video platform where you can find gamers and one of the best networks for gaming influencers. With it, you can build gaming experiences that allow your audience to interact with live sessions, through commenting and dynamic gifting. And it lets you to broadcast quality visuals for different data streams, including kill counters, player stats, and mini maps.

Price: $4.99/month for the basic plan
Supports: all major platforms

Discord

tools for game developers - Discord

Nowadays, every gamer is using Discord to chat while they play. Therefore, savvy developers are setting up their own channels to get engaged with their community, roll out demo versions of their games, and stream prototypes or developer QandAs to their fans.

Price: 0
Supports: all major platforms

Lootlocker

tools for game developers - Lootlocker

Built for indie developers by indie developers, Lootlocker is the way to build, ship, and launch your game to a large audience. Easily add loot boxes, leaderboards, achievements, currencies, and leveling systems to your game, then manage your players and assets once you’ve launched.

Price: 0 (for first 10.000 players)
Supports: all major platforms

Creative Tools For Game Developers

Luna

tools for game developers - Luna

Nothing is better than a quick demo of your game. So. link Luna with Unity to create a playable advert or a quick video of your gameplay and encourage players to try out your product, without needing them to commit. It’s the perfect way of making sure that people get to experience your creation before making a decision.

Price: $0
Supports: Unity

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is arguably still one of the best ways to texture various game assets when creating 3D models. As a tool used by creative professionals in all different industries, it comes packed with comprehensive creation features that offer developers everything they need to craft inspired game concepts into sophisticated digital realities.

Price: starting at $20,99/month
Supports: all major platforms

Gimp

tools for game developers - Gimp

GIMP is a great free alternative to Adobe Photoshop and comes with a wide range of professional-quality functions. Whether you’re looking for filters, tools, rendering effects, or formatting capabilities, GIMP offers great features for fine-tuning your game assets. And all this without having to spend a penny!

Price: $0
Supports: all major platforms

Sound and Audio Tools For Game Developers

Audacity

tools for game developers - Audacity

Audacity is a free, open-source, cross-platform audio editor that brings many premium paid-for applications. It helps you to record your own dialogues for the game actions and add special effects, enhancing the gameplay actions. As it combines many useful and powerful features with an intuitive interface, it is practical for both audio wizards and sound-tech newbies.

Price: $0
Supports: all major platforms

Freesound

tools for game developers - Freesound

Using Freesound‘s large collection of CC-licensed audio samples, you can take your game to the next level by giving it that special touch you’ve been looking for. The best part? You can readily access here meaningful sound information that otherwise might be difficult to source or costly: the sounds themselves, as well as metadata and analysis files.

All you need to do is to use the Freesound API and search into its huge database. This way, you’ll have access to some great synthesized sounds, snippets, field recordings bleeps, and all kinds of other sound bites.

Price: $0
Supports: all major platforms

FL Studio

tools for game developers - FL Studio

Many developers now use FL Studio to create music for video games. Therefore, if you’re adding bespoke sound content to your game, this is a practical and reliable tool that will help you bring your audio landscape to perfection. FL Studio is flexible, quite straightforward well equipped, allowing you to finish your masterpieces and easily export them to relevant formats.

Price: €89 for the basic edition
Supports: all major platforms

Final Thoughts

There are many apps and tools that help you to improve your game. Finding the best ones that perfectly fit your gaming app is important, but can be also a tricky and daunting task. However, you will find in this list some of the best tools for game developers that can help you make your game a success.