With many of today's games being released simultaneously on all platforms, the need for a good cross-platform development strategy is essential. Cross-Platform Game Programming covers this rarely discussed area and provides the techniques needed to develop your games effectively.

This book covers both the theory and practice of game engine software development, bringing together complete coverage of a wide range of topics. The concepts and techniques described are the actual ones used by real game studios like Electronic Arts and Naughty Dog.

It does not cover architecting a game engine, or API and implementation, from the ground up, but covers most of the basic ideas or systems you might find in one.

This book presents the core mathematics necessary for sophisticated 3D graphics and interactive physical simulations. Whether you need to ace mathematical parts of your interview, or need another edge on a tricky 3D problem, this book has you mostly covered for the basics and some advanced cases.

I have the second edition, but there is a third edition; if you've read it please let me know how you think it compares.

GENie (pronounced as Jenny) is project generator tool. It automagically generates project from Lua script, making applying the same settings for multiple projects easy.

7-Zip is a multi-threaded file archiver that supports many formats. Can be used from the command-line, gui, or shell integration.

Godot Engine is a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so users can focus on making games without having to reinvent the wheel. Games can be exported in one click to a number of platforms, including the major desktop platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows) as well as mobile (Android, iOS) and web-based (HTML5) platforms.

gDEBugger is an advanced OpenGL and OpenCL Debugger, Profiler and Memory Analyzer. letting you trace application activity on top of the OpenGL and OpenCL APIs and see what is happening within the system implementation. Helps you optimize OpenGL and OpenCL applications performance.

HandBrake is a multi-threaded tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs very quickly. I use this on a regular basis for game development, usually bug recording, or showing off something cool I did.

Possibly the fastest disk space analyzer, and it's free! By using a Treemap visualization layout, you have immediate perception of where big folders and files are placed on your devices.

A modern messaging app for teams. It puts Skype to shame. Download page here; check out the mobile app, it rocks. Slack is not a light weight program though, it's all web driven, which may bug some people. But you can run it from your browser, you don't have to download it.

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. You'll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance. Plugins are made in Python, so they're portable. There's a user made Package Control that everyone uses to make things easier. I love the multi-cursor feature, allowing you to edit multiple items at once, making me more productive than other applications can.

Trello is the easy, free, flexible, and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything. I use it for task management on multiple projects. See how it can help you.

Locate files and folders by name instantly. Install as a service so it's always indexing in the background. Much more useful than Windows search, providing filters and more, and much faster.

f.lux makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. I know Windows has night light now, but I like f.lux's built in hotkeys for changing brightness.

MPC is an extremely light-weight, open source media player for Windows. It supports all common video and audio file formats available for playback. Offers forward/backward frame stepping with sane default shortcuts, useful for frame debugging in game development.

RenderDoc is an open source stand-alone graphics debugging tool available for D3D11 and OpenGL development.

Unreal Engine is a complete suite of game development tools made by game developers, for game developers. From 2D mobile games to console blockbusters and VR, Unreal Engine gives you everything you need to start, ship, grow and stand out from the crowd.

Free easy to use virtual CD/DVD drive. Supports mounting all common image formats like ISO, IMG, BIN, etc. Download here (it's the only freeware listed).

Visual Studio is an integrated development environment that, for my purposes, makes it fast and easy to create and debug native applications for Windows.

Developed in Austria, France, and Germany, Manjaro provides all the benefits of the Arch operating system combined with a focus on user-friendliness and accessibility. Great out of the box experience and defaults. Steam works well. Has default battery optimizations which gives big gains for laptop users. Seems like a professionally developed distro.