Game Design: Tools you need to get familiar with, a bunch of downloads and installs

In the current environment of game design you can get away with flash and dash game design, that is rapidly put together your game post it and make your money then move on to another project.  Many technologies go this way from time to time and then they move back to design, design, build, maintain and modify.  Technologies that are innovative allow this type of environment and teamwork.

If you write a quick game engine and then are unable to maintain it, because one or two of your workers leave without documentation, then you will lose money.  If you use a robust version control like GitHub (is it really worth $100,000,000?  Wasn’t Digg worth something like that figure a few years ago?  It just sold for $500,000), that’s good for source control and build.  But what if you really want to graduate to a total design package that allows you to view the total design situation?

Enter Team Foundation Services, which has cleaned up nicely, I will tell you now that I could never get that to work without a silly amount of work.  That has all changed, Team Foundation Server is available at:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29918 (this will load the TF server on your system, this is not cloud based)

For the online server go to: https://tfspreview.com/en-us/ and sign up, either works with Android, Eclipse, etc.

What about other tools, etc.  You will need to also install Visual Studio 12 RC on your system:

https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4D74E784-4D26-40A8-9DFB-D6500355A67F&displaylang=zh-cn&displaylang=en

You will need the Visual Studio Premium 2012 RC so that you can create team projects

 

Once you install both of them, get the Office 2013, whatever version you want to try, I used the Home Premium, and go ahead set up the skydrive functionality. 

https://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en?WT.mc_id=MSCOM_EN_US_HP_FEATUREWORK_131L1ENUS21367

You can use PowerPoint 2010 with storyboarding, but I will use the PowerPoint2013

Then you will need Visio and Project, so get the Visio 2013 and Project 2013 at:

Visio:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/hh973399

Project:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/hh973401.aspx?wt.mc_id=TEC_119_1_33