What external tools to you use with Monogame?

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Monogame is more of a framework then a full-blown engine, and as such I’ve found that professional developers usually use other tools to aid in their development process. A great example of this is Celeste (made in Monogame), where the devs used or created a myriad of tools to develop the game (check out the list at https://celestegame.tumblr.com/tools).

So, my question extends to you guys. What do you use? What have you found improves your development process or speeds up your workflow?

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Cool question, and thanks for the Celeste link, interesting to know.

Of top of a my head, quick rundown:

Spine - Skeletal Animation

Photoshop - 2D frame animation / Art creation

PIXI-Particles - Particle Editor (+ C# port of engine)

TexturePacker - To pack textures into larger texture atlases

MonoGame - Rendering, audio & input

Some Unnamed Internal Game Engine - Built on top of MonoGame, contains a bunch of stuff including scene graph, materials, batching, scene management, input handling, PUB / SUB messaging, display objects such sprites, animated sprites, spine etc,

Some Bitmap Font editor - Whatever the arist prefers, sometimes BMFont, another good free one is littera

Asana - For bug tracking, general project management etc.

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Some bits & pieces off the top of my head:

  • Aseprite: editing of sprites and other images
  • Gitea: self-hosted source code repo + bug tracking; see my setup here. My main engine is open-source, but I have a private repo (set up as a git submodule) for all the platform-specific code & for game content (since third-party art & music usually has licenses that prevent open-source redistribution).
  • DigitalOcean for cloud machines.
  • GuitarPro for noodling around with music ideas, not necessarily because it’s the best tool for the job, but because I play guitar and it was the tool I had already paid for. I haven’t gotten far enough along in my project yet to decide whether I’ll try to write my own music or to pay someone else to do it :slight_smile:

I use Visual Studio 2019 for most development on the game itself, but Sublime Text for writing miscellaneous utilities (Python scripts, etc). I’m mostly a Linux / command-line person, so even though I use VS for development & building, all of the “other stuff” (git, code search, managing assets, etc) is done within a WSL Ubuntu container.

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Did you know that Xenko is basically MonoGame with all the tooling? I’ve started a thread here:

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I use TexturePacker too (already mentioned) and in the past I used PhysicsEditor, also from Code & web. It worked very well combined with Farseer, but that was quite some time ago (Aether.Physics2D would be my choice now for 2D)

I been using MagicaVoxel too, it’s very nice for creating voxel models, and if you count a physics library as an external tool, right now I’m also using Bepu.

Most of the tools I use are custom made, though.

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Ooh, one more – the Celeste level editor is called Ogmo, and they released an open-source “community edition” of it: https://ogmo-editor-3.github.io

This was mentioned in the “Celeste tools” post as “something we’re hoping to release after launch” – well, it’s been released as of a ~year ago. I noodled around with it a bit today and it seemed pretty useful for anyone who wants to build a tile-based 2D world.

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I still use old tools but do the job ^_^Y

Bryce : for SkyBox creation and terrain creation Obj/Heightmap.
MilkShape : for Model animation.
Delgine CE : for lightmapping and level creation.
GIMP : for normal map creation.
Audacity : for audio editing.

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