Are you starting a project, but you aren’t sure what tools you should use to keep your production documentation in order? This guide compares some of the most popular production tools used by student teams, emerging developers, indie studios, and AAA companies. Whether you’re managing a student capstone, a solo prototype, or a studio project, these insights will hopefully help you choose tools that will ensure you can manage your production pipeline as intuitively as possible while proactively managing communication, collaboration, and accountability on your team.

Understanding risks is an important part of production, and it’s often overlooked. You might not think about the factors that will negatively impact your development plan until something goes wrong: you have a conflict in your version control that takes time to resolve, your game engine updates and introduces some confusing bugs you need to fix, or a key team member is suddenly unavailable. By the time these problems appear, it’s often too late to respond without delays, stress, or cutting scope.

Estimation is the act of predicting how much time, effort, and resources will be required to progress a videogame's development from one milestone to another. That could be from ideation through to release, from one sprint to another, or any milestone length in between.

It can be easy to become overly focused on mastering one particular engine, but for emerging developers, the real skill is adaptability. Each engine brings its own constraints and affordances, and these limitations can spark new forms of creativity. By stepping outside the comfort of a single tool, developers gain a broader understanding of how games can be structured, built, and communicated.

As you’re entering the games industry, it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy. I asked my network for the advice they would give to students who are nearly finished their tertiary studies in game development or who have just entered the industry. Here’s what they said…