Top Tools We Certainly Do Not Want to Live Without

I attest that our team spends quite a few hours helping our clients with performance optimization & game development.

No surprise there.

But something I’m especially proud of is to dedicate time every week to finding and developing tools that make our lives easier, our output better and hence our clients 🥰.

Last month we published a Unity Performance Taskforce module going through the top tools that have constantly improved our practice over the years. We explained the tools, the synergies between them and the non-obvious use cases where they help us most in our daily work. Game development, consulting practice and even business & personal usage.

It’s been a while I don’t shoot a newsletter email, so I thought I’d quickly list some of these tools in case they fit your use case:

• Perplexity AI: we use this on a daily basis for all sort of use cases (and no, generating code is not what we use it most commonly for). It also synergizes well with all tools below if you get to know how to use it well.
• Ripgrep: finding code (or documents) extremely fast in large codebases. Think of 100k+ LoC projects plus all large Unity packages such as URP/HDRP.
• T4 Text Templating: it helps us enforce coding/documenting/project standards and it gets rid of some boilerplate when generating code.
• Restic: to incrementally back up our projects, business & personal data by targeting multiple compressed repositories. Since I don’t trust one single source (computer, cloud provider, not even myself), we do this daily.
• Whisperx: to transcribe all our internal and (some) client meetings to then store & automatically summarize them. This helps us find hidden knowledge through ripgrep when we need it most in the future.
• Windmill: to automate and run apps, workflows and scripts in distributed workers without having these tools installed nor maintained in our few dozen computers. Some of my website features are based on this for instance, also our transcription and summarization pipeline, etc..
• Hdg Remote Debugger: to do A/B performance tests that add intel to our performance optimization reports for our consulting clients. Plus, it helps us tweak and diagnose gameplay behaviours.

No affiliate whatsoever with any of these tools (except last one which earns me a penny on every purchase — eventually it’ll buy me a coffee).

I recommend them because we wouldn’t be so far without them. Use them at your own benefit/risk :-)

Hope they help,

Ruben (The GameDev Guru)