Tools are essential to game development as they speed up asset creation and management, as well as reduce the size of the game engine code. This is important for mobile devices where there are greater constraints on the size of the game resources and heap memory. SilverBirch Studios has developed an array of tools that work with our core game engine to quickly and efficiently create content for our games.

1. Animation Tool (Mobile & handheld):
The Animation Tool allows for quick creation of animations that only use a minimal amount of image data. This allows the artist to create a vast amount of different character actions or effects without having to worry about the storage constraints of the mobile devices. This means that your game can have more animations to provide a richer experience.

2. Level Editor (Mobile):
The Level Editor is the most important tool for building the content and flow of the game. It allows a game designer to build maps, script the flow of the game, define collision elements, create enemies and other game elements. Having all of the game content created outside of the code allows for a clean, optimize, and robust game engine. Content can be quickly scaled and modified for each reference build depending on the features supported. This tool provides effective visual feedback for the game designers so that levels can be modified to ensure a fun playable and challenging experience.

3. Font Tool (Mobile):
The Font Tool allows for the definition of graphical fonts that map ASCII characters to graphical characters. This allows us to provide custom fonts that are stylized to art in the game. This tool can support all languages that can be expressed with ASCII characters, such as: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

4. User Interface Tool (Mobile):
The UI Tool provides the creative director and artists with the ability to design the User Interface for a variety of different screen sizes without needing to have a developer build it for them. This allows for faster and more creative UI designs that look good on many different screen sizes. The flexible data format allows for the User Interface to be skinned with a totally different look and feel, while still maintaining the same functionality. These skins can be packaged into a downloadable content package.

5. PNG Tool (Mobile):
The PNG Tool is used to provide advanced operations on images before they go into the game. The images can be optimized, altered, or sections of the data broken up to allow for features such as palette manipulation.

6. Packaging Tool (Mobile):
The Packaging Tool bundles resources into pack files to allow for higher compression ratios and to facilitate downloadable content packages. It also provides encryption support to make sure the resources are difficult for third parties to gain access to the game assets.