The Significance of Content Creation Tools for Game Development

Abstract: The development of computer games is a costly process, costly because it takes so much time and because it needs highly educated personnel to create the digital content. As a result, on most game development projects, much effort is spent on trying to reduce the time consumption of the project. One of the methods to achieve this is to create software tools, intuitive tools that can be used by people who are not necessarily specialized in programming, to speed up repetitive tasks and simplify the design process of the game.

The focus of this thesis has been to examine the process of software tool creation and usage; to find which parts of the game development process that benefit from tools and how time consuming the creation of the tools is. Also how the quality and user-friendliness impacts the end result and how much, if any, time was saved.

To find an answer to all these questions the task for this thesis was to help develop an in progress game engine and then use it to produce a prototype game.