I just published the notes of the Tool Design Roundtable at Devcom (Gamescom Dev) 2025: https://rystorm.com/blog/tool-design-roundtable-gamescom-dev-devcom-2025

The topics this year were varied, and overlapped in interesting ways about software architecture, user research, and big green buttons.

Notes of the Tool Design Roundtable at Devcom (Gamescom Dev) 2025 — Robin-Yann Storm, Product & UX Designer for Tools

What topics were brought up, and what was discussed, at the Tool Design Roundtable of Devcom (Gamescom Dev) 2025?

Robin-Yann Storm, Product & UX Designer for Tools

@RYStorm I found this amusing: "While an engineer may be dangerous to interrupt"

engineers are known to bite when you disturb them in their coding 😛

The part about the "magic wand" is good but can be a dualsided blade if people treat it as plans (as happened in a recent job i had, though that place seemed to approach every aspect of toolmaking the wrong way).

@RYStorm though personally i always have a "do bother me" take since often users try to fix issues themselves in suboptimal ways (i remember a case where a system needed an index map that for w/e reason was shown grayscale in the engine and the artists printed a cheatsheet with brightness ranges -- i replaced that with colors and editor UI for specifying exactly what each index does, but only did that because i was talking with an artist and the figures on the cheatsheet caught my attention)