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I just published the notes of the Tool Design Roundtables & OpenUSD Roundtables from GDC 2026: Tool Design: rystorm.com/blog/tool-de... OpenUSD: rystorm.com/blog/openusd... These roundtables are always a great way to learn what the industry is doing, what is going well, and what is not going well

One of the most fun things this year was a question we had never gotten before: "What is the coolest tool you have built, that has no purpose?" We heard of a few: ‘Serenity Now’, which automatically did a Google search for ‘kittens’. So you clicked the button, and kittens would appear on screen.

And: A tool that would automatically make a kudos thread on Slack. It would encourage people give thanks to folks on the team, for any work that they did that week. Complementing people who make tools is incredibly rare, so compliments are really nice to get!

Another tool was a tracker for an art director, who many folks often have to talk to, but who was rarely at their desk. So they made a tracker so that you could look up whether the art director was at their desk or not, so you would not waste time walking over.

Someone else made a tool that allowed you to put in the names of the people you were going to have a meeting with, and it would tell you the cost of that meeting. It only did so with approximate salaries, based on seniority of the role, but the cost still generally made sense.

Someone else had made seasonal themes for their tools! For example, during Christmas there would be Santa hats and Christmas candy canes in the UI. For Halloween there would be pumpkins, and stuff like that, inside the tool UI.