In this series of articles I’m going to show how to create some high-impact, low-effort tools to help develop your game in UE4. Tools range from simple batch files or humble debug commands to complex ensembles like the UE4 level editor or Max/Maya; but for now let’s focus on some approaches that don’t require a broad knowledge of Unreal Engine or Slate to pull off. Some of these topics deserve a post of their own, but I’m going to start with more of a survey approach and see what people are most interested in digging into.
Programming is all about strategic laziness: the guiding philosophy developing tools is to spend time now to save someone time later, improving overall developer efficiency. This might play out by allowing the user to finish the same tasks in less time or it might allow them to perform more iterations in the same amount of time, increasing polish level and fun factor. Ideally you also save more time than was involved in making the tool, but that is not a hard requirement due to other factors like user morale, making it possible for a different group of people to do the work, reducing mistakes when the cost of failure is high, etc… This is especially true when it comes to automating key processes where a mistake might cause downtime or otherwise hurt your customers, e.g., releasing a broken update or corrupting a database.