I am relatively new to Godot and have been building with basic shapes and Godot robot faces. I would like to start learning to create my own assets, primarily 2d sprites and levels. I am also interested in just about anything from art to sound to code to whatever other external tooling you might use to support your Godot workflow!
#What are your favorite external tools to use with Godot?
fading glacier
versed halo
Blender for all 3d asset creation. It’s amazing 
For 2D Pixel Art Aseprite is popular
fading glacier
I will check those out, thank you!
sour niche
Blender for 3D, Inkscape for SVG, Krita for 2D, AseSprite for Pixelart, Github for source control, 3D Coat for texturing 3d models, Obsidian MD for writing
@fading glacier
red gazelle
I would recommend VSCode, it can really make refactoring a lot easier (though it is still not as good as static languages or even typescript)
tepid thorn
i tried vscode for a bit, but the debugger is not great, much more limited visibility when trying to debug nodes, etc.
i actually use my ipad a bit, especially for prototyping, i use pixaki for pixel art, procreate for other stuff. i've used garage band for music
i have gitlab setup for code, probably move to github. gimp, inkscape, aseprite
red gazelle
might be but the amount of time I have spend refactoring code vs needing a step through debugger is like 99.99% to 0.01% but your milage may vary (and you can always switch to the editor when you really need the debugger)
tepid thorn
yeah thats fair and I do like vscode, but i'm in the debugger a fair bit and im willing to deal with the subpar editor for the better debugging, links to docs, and a few little things
my next project will probably be in c# though, and some of those advantages will go away with that
fading glacier
thank you all for the great suggestions! i will definitely be checking all of these out
i am a neovim user personally, i am a full time software engineer so i am too attached to my setup to work without it haha. I have my setup linked to godot and debugging, docs, LSP, etc work great! have you all tried this plugin, and if so, does it not do what you need? https://github.com/godotengine/godot-vscode-plugin
tepid thorn
Yeah it’s good but it doesnt have very deep integration with godot. Like if you have a breakpoint or an exception, you only get some surface level info and you cant inspect things like node resources, and since there is no interactive shell for the debugger, i am stuck with the ui
As ryan said, for most usecases its fine, but my style of dev is often end up relying on the debugger to learn how things work, im constantly placing breakpoints, and inspecting whatever is in memory
Tried it for a while, but i frequently had to go back to the godot editor, and since i didnt want to change the default editor, i often ended up with vscode open, but just not touching it
sour niche
Rider also has a godot integration, but I have not tested it. Jetbrains stuff is my go-to for day-to-day software dev so that could also be worth exploring
fervent roost
been using Rider as my main IDE with 3 different godot projects for nearly a month now. It's a little buggy with some stuff and will flag otherwise perfectly normal GDScript code as an error, but I've not run into any unworkable issues.
I wouldn't say it's worth it if you're solely using GDScript, though.
sour niche
I wouldn't say it's worth it if you're solely using GDScript, though.
I daily drive that and webstorm for fullstack development so in my case it makes sense
fervent roost
yeah after my trial is up I'm gonna upgrade to dotUltimate because dotTrace has been ridiculously helpful with Godot as well