Skip to main content

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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Free Art Assets for Tabletop Games

I know as well as most of you what a pain it can be to get decent art on a tiny budget. In fact, for me at least, finding art is one of the biggest hurtles between a good design and a finished game.  It's expensive, it can be hard to find, and it's stressful.  And if you're like me, it's really hard to barter over the price of another creative's services;  You know they're pouring out their heart and soul for your game, and that's priceless.  But at the same time, most of us game designers don't have deep pockets, and anywhere we can save a few dollars gets us that much closer to actually getting your dream out there. Because of this struggle, I've compiled a list of some of my favorite resources for getting %100 free art, no strings attached.  Of course, it won't be tailored to your game, and you probably will need to commission some of your own stuff before all is said and done, but it can get you pretty far with your game, and might save y
4 comments
Read more

Project Heracles - Design Journal, Day Four

Day Four(11/25/19) After a full, but sadly gameless, weekend, I finally got some playtesting done today, as well as a rough draft for the graphic design of my cards.   Not too bad, but I wish I could have done more. The playtesting mostly just verified that the system was solid enough, though I did end up doing a bit of power-tweaking to make things more even.   I’m considering taking out the more mundane abilities of Marksman, Brawler, and Multi-Tasker, as they don’t add much flavor, and they are impossible to reflect on the standees.   A possible replacement for Marksman(+3 Ranged Skill) would be X-Ray Vision(+1 Ranged Skill, Ignore line of sight).   Other than that, the only new content I’ve added is a new power, Flameskin(Ranged attack, and when you’re attacked in Melee, deal damage). As for the graphic design, I’ve got a pretty decent draft for my cards done: As you can see, it’s very rough at the moment, but I think it gives a pretty good impression of
Post a Comment
Read more

Don't Be Shy: DMing 2.0

W e’ve all seen that player.   The one who never interacts with the group, and only really exists to jam their “slash” button during combat.  No one wants their players to be this way, and these players aren’t having much fun, either.   The only real issue is shyness, or unsureness of what they’re “supposed” to do.   This, of course, can be remedied, and that’s today’s topic. Ask the Player Directly One of the best ways to get players to interact is simply to ask them to do so.   This is very simple, and equally effective.   Essentially, when players are doing something, such as talking to an NPC, and one player isn’t saying anything, simply say something like “Jeff, do you have anything to say?”   They may say no, and if they do, just say “Okay” and move on. Reward Roleplay In psychology, this is known as Positive Reinforcement.   In short, when you reward good actions, people tend to repeat those actions.   In RPGs, you can do this in a variety of ways to pr
Post a Comment
Read more