The Cheat Panel - a Dev Console for the Lazy
In gamedev, one basic problem is daily business: how do you get your game quickly into the state that allows you to test the bit you are working on right now. This is often difficult, because of the game being a big monolith, that can only run as a whole.This loop of "change something, launch the game, reach the state needed to test the change, learn" on repeat is crucial to get short, it's a game changer to bring that down from 5 minutes to 1 minute, or from 30s to 5s. I'm sure you are familiar with it.
There are many ways to go about shortening the cycle like hot reload, editor previews or special builds/tools. One very common thing is a dev console.
It is a powerful tool to manipulate the game state, to quickly get it to where you need it. Now follows my personal preferences: i don't like it, because typing is time consuming and you have to know the syntax. At the same time 90% of the commands i'd type would be the same - noclip, immortality, spawn something or gain some resources. Basic stuff.
What i use for this is a cheat panel, that both displays some key information and has many buttons that would represent console commands, but don't need any typing or syntax. I open and close it by pressing F1 and cheat my way to wherever i need it. If a new function is needed, it can be quickly implemented in a few minutes. I wish i started using this earlier, as this one has already saved me ton of time. It's also much easier to use for any teammates.
I have more things key to my productivity, but they are Godot specific in my case. Just the outline: in Godot you can change almost anything while the game is running. Change code, add new functions, move objects, inspect and edit live objects and properties and so on. The other bit is that you can launch any "scene" in Godot standalone, a scene basically being just an entity/object in the game. With that it becomes incredibly easy to build little test scenes, containing only a tiny subset of the game, but exactly that which is needed to test a feature.
What do you think? Am i understimating the dev console? What are big productivity helpers for you?