Share your game making setup (hw & soft)

[DiviDreamer]

Hi, i always was interested in game making and a bit gamedev myself
i wonder what hardware and software you use to make your game,
share your workflow and maybe tips for beginners and pro.
Thanks!
And i'l be first:
I use i5-4570s, 8GB, 128GB SSD, 1050 ti and one monitor setup (i wish i had two)
as IDE i use Notepad++ and Atom with Renpy and highlight plugins.
Game engines like Renpy and RPGM, still learning Unity.
Blender for render and Adobe AE for CG and post effects.

 

[Jofur]

I'm a Unity Dev making a non-porn game, so I don't know if it applies to this thread.

For my IDE I use Visual Studio. I've had my eye on Rider, but I can't justify that monthly cost. God I hate that all programs are subscription based these days.
For 3D graphics Blender, Photoshop for texturing and 2D stuff, still haven't found a proper free replacement for it. Maybe some day.
For audio editing I just use Audacity(no FMOD or anything). I've played around a bit making music in LMMS, but I don't have a musical bone in my body.
For project management I just use .txt documents and spreadsheets. I also sporadically use Trello.com.

As for hardware:
Ryzen 5 3600, GeForce RTX 2060, 12GB ram, one 500gb SSD and two 1TB HDD's for storage.
Nothing especially fancy. Building a PC with todays prices/GPU shortage is hell. Luckily I decided to aim for 60fps at 1080p for most modern games, so I mostly got away with mid-range hardware.

My biggest tip is to scale back your ideas and write out a basic design document. Something you can always look for to direction of what to do next, track progress, and more importantly, something that stops you from impulsively adding content or features all the time when the mood takes you. Nothing kills development like feature creep.

 

[MissFortune]

Software is pretty run of the mill for most devs around here on the Daz/Renpy side. Daz, Renpy, Photoshop, After Effects/Premiere Pro/InDesign (rarely), Atom, XnConvert, and Audacity.

My workflow is basically Daz/Render > Make folders for each version (so for 0.3, there'd be Raw Renders folder/Postwork folder/then "Converted" folder for converting later on) > Postwork > Convert. Then write and code (however simple it is) > find/insert music.

For hardware, I'm a bit on the high-end (given the state of the market, seemingly, at least) with a i7-10700, ASUS TUF 3080 (wish it was a 3090, though lol. I couldn't swallow spending $4,000 USD for a GPU), 64GB of RAM, 500GB m.2 SSD and a 2TB sata SSD. Power supply isn't anything special, just a 700W EVGA. Have a vertically stacked monitors, 32-inch LG on top and a 34-inch LG ultrawide on the bottom.

As for any tips? I'll echo what Jofur said. Scope creep is real and it's tempting to add more each time you open Daz or whatever program you're working in. Keep it small at first, learn your craft and grow.

 

[Dunderdeuce]

Intel i7 920 c0 (@ stock), 12GB ddr3, 2TB green HDD (I die every time I have to load textures), GTX 1060 6GB and Two 24” monitors, IPS as main and TN as secondary.
The CPU used to run overclocked at 3.8ghz but the RAM hasn’t aged that gracefully and is far too unstable now after 13 years of service.

I use visual studio code for code stuff, preferably in light mode (I’m not a psychopath).
Blender for making stuff that I don’t want to splash my cash on, blender + daz for rendering.

Tips: Don’t store your materials/textures on a slow drive, the loading times might just drive you mad.

 

[MissFortune]

Tips: Don’t store your materials/textures on a slow drive, the loading times might just drive you mad.

The speed difference between a modern HDD and sata SSD are basically negligible.

Part of the problem is that you're using an HDD that was never designed for this type of stuff. It was always a low performance/low noise drive. A 2TB Seagate Barracuda HDD is $46 ($80 for 4TB), and far, far faster.

 

[Meaning Less]

The speed difference between a modern HDD and sata SSD are basically negligible.

That's enough internet for today.

 

[MissFortune]

That's enough internet for today.

As far as Daz goes? There's no difference, and if there is, it's minimal at best. I've done it myself, went from a Seagate Barracuda to a Crucial sata SSD. Both using Daz products almost exclusively. Zero difference. Plenty of Daz threads with the same conclusion (here's

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, for example). Nvme? Yeah, that's a totally different animal, but you're also paying quite a lot more.

 

[Droid Productions]

Unity dev, working on Love of Magic (code/art/design/effects) and Paradise Lust (code, co-design).

System:
Ryzen 7 5700X, 64GB.
Nvidia 3070 10GB VRAM (not enough VRAM, but with supply lines tangled, getting a 3090 is out of my reach)
1TB NVMe (OS + Software), 1TB SSD (Unity projects), 10TB HDD (assets and non-unity projects)

Software Stack:
Unity
DAZ (for Love of Magic; Paradise Lust is all 2D handpainted)
Spine2D (for character animation)
Adobe AfterEffects (for videos/cutscenes)
Blender (for larger 3D scenes, or for one-off animations like the dragon egg cracking using Rigid Body physics)
Photoshop (for...well, everything).

 

[Deleted member 4484353]

The speed difference between a modern HDD and sata SSD are basically negligible.

Part of the problem is that you're using an HDD that was never designed for this type of stuff. It was always a low performance/low noise drive. A 2TB Seagate Barracuda HDD is $46 ($80 for 4TB), and far, far faster.

Even modern HDDs are slow af in compare to (modern) SSDs. HDDs are recommendable when it comes to storage, because they're extremely cheap these days.

 

[MissFortune]

Even modern HDDs are slow af in compare to (modern) SSDs. HDDs are recommendable when it comes to storage, because they're extremely cheap these days.

Of course SSDs are faster in almost every regard, I never said HDDs were faster than SSDs. I was referring to Daz itself and nothing more. As I've already stated, loading times for everything in Daz are basically the same between SSDs and HDDs.

 

[Dunderdeuce]

I got curious about the difference between using an SSD over an HDD when loading textures, so I temporarily borrowed my work-laptops SSD for this test.
specs:
HDD: Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 32MB 2TB
SSD: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB

Spoiler: HDD+SSD benchmark

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Worth mentioning is that the SSD is bottlenecked by SATA 2 (3Gbit/s) while the HDD is far from reaching the SATA 2 limit.

I tested it out in blender 3.0 because that’s what I mainly use and it was much easier to set up for this test.
Three different combinations were used:
Blend-file on SSD + textures on HDD
Blend-file on SSD + textures on SSD
Blend-file on HDD + textures on HDD

Spoiler: Loading times

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1 sample renders of the same scene to keep it focused on the load time and not the render itself.

If it makes a difference in Daz is unknown to me but it seems to matter in Blender, at least in my case.