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I have been looking at different jobs in the games industry and a lot of the jobs that I have seen advertised are for a "Tool Developer" position. I do not know what this actually is.
Could someone explain what this is to me please? And if anyone has any links to material that would help me understand it more then that would be very much appreciated.
A tools programming position is generally about being a force-multiplier for the rest of the development team. The exact nature of the work will of course vary widely from studio-to-studio, depending on the individualized needs of that company.
Primarily, however, you would be tasked with creating software that was going to be consumed by other developers within the studio, and the role of that software might be to:
It's also important to note that in some studios this is considered an extremely entry-level position, because it ends up involving mostly thoughtless grunt work (moving buttons around on a UI for a designer, perhaps). In others, it's exactly the opposite, because it involves the care and feeding of mission-critical build and deployment pipelines for live shipping MMOs.
The range of responsibility and expectation is large (although really, this is true of almost any position in the industry), but the overall goal is usually the same: keep on the lookout for any bottlenecks in the organization, and then buy, build or retrain until you have optimized that bottleneck.
In short: Develop programs used by others to create something (i.e. tools).
A popular and easy example would be a level editor for a game.
But this could be a lot more behind the scenes, like some version tracking program, a bug tracker, forums, some checker to verify content is without mistakes, etc.
A tools programmer is a specialized role, one that is becoming essential to production. You are essentially someone who looks at the pipeline used to create a game and find ways to optimise the process.
As a tools programmer for several triple-A games, I have done:
In some studios, e.g. independent, it is expected that every programmer can write tools to help the production of the game.
There are a few links below to the IGDA Tools SIG and the Toolsmiths blog (International Game Developers - Tools Special Interest Group).
Scenario 1: Flash and AS3
Sometimes you need to create certain functionalities which will help yourself more in your game production pipeline . By 'tool' it means something that can help speed your development process.
For example Flash basically does not provide with perfect pixel collision detection. So you could either write one yourself or try googling whether some guy has done it earlier and put it up as opensource code. A collection of source codes in properly arranged folders will folders will benefit you in the long run. Something like your own library.
Scenario 2 Unity
Likewise you can use unityscript(unity version of javascript) or c# to write components, small small tools for example B Splines, Bezier curves. Things that does not come as default in unity. Either write one yourself or get one from out there in the internet. They come in free/paid versions.
