Top Organizational Tools for Game Designers

I don’t know about you, but my head is a really messy place to be.

As I’m sure many of you know, a crowded mind is one of the drawbacks to being a creative person—  It can’t be helped when you have so many games, books, paintings, songs, or whatever else you make jumping around all the time.  Because of this, I find it helpful to have a very structured, but easily edited, place to store my thoughts, and I thought I’d share three of my favorites with you guys!  Two of them are free, but the third is a physical product which obviously costs money, but it’s worth every penny.  Enjoy!

Trello

(Free)

Trello is one the best tools out there for organization, and I’m sure many of you have already heard of it.  In essence, Trello is like a digital pin-board, but a with a few handy little tricks built in, such as shuffling and programmable buttons.  It’s available on desktop, mobile, and in-browser, with syncing between them all, so if you make some changes on the fly, they show up back home as well.  Oh, and if you need to collaborate with someone, you can share your board with anyone else and see their edits live.

My main use for Trello is for working on card games, as it lets me categorize and easily distinguish all the cards in each game, without bogging me down with too many options.  It’s also nice to be able to keep track of random ideas I have on a long wilderness hike without losing my progress when I get back to society.  All in all, Trello is perfect for anyone who has to keep track of lots of little pieces of data, such as the units in a wargame, spells in a RPG, or the aforementioned cards in, well, card games.

Notion

(Free)

I’m actually relatively new to Notion myself(I was recently introduced to it by a friend in the RPG design industry), but it’s already worked its way irrevocably into my workflow.  Notion is a much more in-depth tool than Trello with many more options, but also a bit more complexity.  Notion uses customizable documents with dozens of formatting options and tools, from checklists, embedded pages, links to other documents, style options, and plenty more.  Like Trello, Notion is easily shareable and supports a good comment system to gather feedback.

Notion does a lot of stuff well, but what I mostly use it for is making rulebooks.  You can start by just streaming out the text that comes at first, and then organizing that mess into pages and lists, and making it look decent the whole way with all the color, images, and text styling Notion can give you.  What’s best about it is the aforementioned shareability—  Just send someone your link and they can comment to alert you to all the stuff you messed up along the way.  Although a bit more intimidating than Trello, Notion is perfect for these more in-depth documents.

Rocketbook Everlast

($29.73-$31.90*)

Rocketbook is an infinitely reusable, smart notebook.  What does that mean?  First, ‘infinitely reusable’ means each page can be wiped clean any number of times with just a damp cloth, but it doesn’t smear until take water to it.  ‘Smart’ means it can be uploaded to your email, Google Drive, Evernote— even Trello— with an app on your phone.  It has a few other handy features, such as customizable icons at the bottom to send your document to a certain place automatically and a text recognition tool to turn your notes into editable text, but the one drawback is the fact that you need special pens to write on it.  The Rocketbook comes with one, and mine hasn’t run out yet, so it’s not too painful.  It’s also worth noting that you can print your own pages for free if you don’t care about the reusable part.

Other than just sending my game design notes to my computer, the Rocketbook is great for hand sketching the layout for my cards, boxes, and boards.  I can even make prototypes of the smaller boards, test them physically, then scan it to my computer to get print ready.  It’s also handy for keeping track of game information, such as life totals or point scores, that would otherwise wast paper, and you have the added bonus of saving those scores for later reference without carrying a massive folder with you everywhere.  By and large, I think the Rocketbook is the most versatile and useful tool in my arsenal.

*at the time this article was written.  $29.73 for the standard size(executive size), $31.90 for the larger variety(letter size).  I earn no royalties from purchases made through these links. 

That’s All!

I hope some of that stuff was useful to you guys!  I’ve found them very helpful myself to bring some semblance of order to my creative process, and I hope they can do the same for you.  So what do you guys think?  Do you use any of these tools yourself?  Do you have any unique uses for them?  Or perhaps you have a favorite tool of your own that you could recommend?  Feel free to comment below!  Thanks as always for reading, and don’t forget to keep on geekin’ on!