Tools:

My dev machine is a 2010 Macbook Pro, running macOS Sierra version 10.12.6, It's on its 2nd battery, 3rd drive (it currently has a 2TB ssd), but it actually still works pretty well. It seems we have passed the point where a faster machine really brings anything new, unless you are playing with really heavy compute applications like AI.

I will need to build the project under a number of IDE, build systems, so the idea is to use CMake to manage all of that, it requires a little more effort to start a project, but really pays off as a project/target set grows. I have installed the latest cmake version 3.9.0.

The hardest part of game development is the tweaking to get the feel just write. This really means you need to keep the cycle between code change, and play testing as short as possible. One way to do this is to be able to build, and run on the same platform, and then to post target. This is my plan. For this reason I will use SDL2-2.0.5 as my application framework. It should be then a simple job to port to IO/Android from there.

For any project source control is a must. I will be using git-2.13.1.

As an editor I'm going to start out with Microsoft Visual Studio Code, I also have Xcode (8.3.3) installed, but I don't really like it, so we will see. I hope to be able to build everything from CMake, perhaps at some point even on a build server.

I have adapted a strategy of trying to be careful about versions, I generally don't update anything, until I'm ready to grab all the latest versions of everything. This means I can keep down things that might cause a change in stability down to a minimum, and just spend a day debugging everything broken by a version change in libraries.