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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Tools Summit: Writing Tools Faster: Design Decisions to Accelerate Tool Development
Speaker(s): Niklas Gray
Company Name(s): Our Machinery
Track / Format: Tools Summit

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Overview: This session discusses the drastic design decisions we made in The Machinery to overcome the problems we had in previous engines (Bitsquid, Stingray) where writing tools became the primary development bottleneck.nnFirst, we minimized the the tech stack to put more control in the hands of the developers. Second, we moved the responsibility for things like undo, copy/paste, save, revert, etc into a shared central data model so that tools get it "for free". Third, we standardized the way in which data interacts with views, so that the same views can be reused for different purposes. nnThis talk will discuss the consequences, pros and cons of our approach and show how it works in a concrete example: implementing an animation state machine editor.

GDC 2020

Niklas Gray

Our Machinery

free content

Tools Summit

Programming