appendix B External tools used alongside Unity
Developing a game using Unity relies on a variety of external software tools for taking care of various tasks. In chapter 1, we discussed one external tool; MonoDevelop is technically a separate application, even though it’s bundled along with Unity. In a similar manner, developers rely on an array of external tools to do work not internal to Unity.
This isn’t to say that Unity is lacking capabilities that it ought to have. Rather, the game development process is so complex and multifaceted that any well-designed piece of software with a clear focus and clean separation of concerns will inevitably limit itself to being good at a limited subset of the process. In this case, Unity concentrates on being the glue and the engine that brings together all the content of a game and makes it function. Creating all that content is done with other tools; let’s take a look at several categories of software that could be useful to you.
B.1 Programming tools
We’ve already looked at MonoDevelop, the most significant programming tool used alongside Unity. But there are other programming tools to be aware of, as you’ll see in this section.