The Apps I Use to Design Games

I just had my first dev team meeting last night and one of the questions was what software we might need. Then this video popped up this morning. The gaming gods work in mysterious ways.

my goodness...the number of times I have been following along with your explanations and thought "man...I wish you would show a real-life example of what you are talking about to solidify this for me" and then you immediately cut to "here is something I have been working on" is insane. It is like you can read minds. You have a real gift for content creation.

Oh, so that's what figma is, and how to use it. You have no idea how big of a problem you've just solved for me. Thank you for this!!!!!!!!!!!

Obsidian is really good for sketching ideas down like you talked about at the beginning of the video, and then being able to index your idea using tags and relations. I initially started using it for worldbuilding like in the example you gave, but then eventually it became the index or 'wiki' for my whole main game project, containing links to other software for the stuff that Obsidian doesn't do well like moodboards etc.

I'm so fortunate to have found your channel just recently. I love the way you articulate your thoughts and you have really great ideas to share! Excited to continue learning from you as I explore game design and pixel art :)

Have you heard about Obsidian's canvas update? It's still in beta testing, but it adds the ability to use an infinite canvas to embed images, webpages, notes, etc. They can be resized, stacked, made into flowcharts, etc. There's no digital ink support in canvases yet, but hopefully vector drawings from the excalidraw plugin will play nice with it!

So valuable hearing your insight and experience with these tools, and how you view your workflow. Thank you!

I really appreciate this video! I recently took a Python course offered by Google and one of the other topics they offer a course on is UX design. I browsed the curriculum and noticed they spend a good chunk of the course working in Figma. I did a very small amount of research and just kept hearing "Figma is a really useful tool", so when I clicked this video and it turns out you mention Figma, and then show what Figma can do, it was really useful! Thanks again.

I've been using OneNote for a couple of years now, as a dude with ADHD it's been invaluable ... slowly all of my regular documents have been getting turned into OneNote documents. This video really planted a few seeds in my head though. They germinated for a few days as I grumbled at the thought of even more programs .... then I downloaded Figma and was pretty impressed. Then I downloaded Obsidian and was pretty wowed. I really appreciate you putting these kinds of ideas out there, this kind of design stuff I'm super interested in! Your videos are such an incredible free resource for artists and game devs.

Some recommendations I use on linux: Joplin for markdown note-taking/tasks; Getting things GNOME! for tasks; Outliner for outlining; Onlyoffice for text, spreadsheets, and presentation; Minder for node-based idea flowchart; Plan by KDE for project management; PureRef for a mood board; Krita for sketching; GridlessDB for databases; Arrow for narrative planning/design.

Very informative video - thank you so much! I really love your mini paintings - gorgeous work!

This was really helpful. New to game dev and i really wished i had seen something like this sooner. Thanks for the quality content

Super interesting! I use Google Keep for writing random ideas I got during the day, and then a lot of pencil and paper to brainstorm and sketch them out. As you said near the end of the video, writing ideas down in a more precise and defined way helps a lot to discover what you really want. I'd be interested also in a video about project/time management tools!

I'm looking to get started in UI/UX game design myself and this has helped, Thank you so much for sharing this.

scrivener is a really flexible word editor. i heard it being used for writing novels and essays. it basically let’s your write several chapters/documents at once, which can be rearranged and also have a short description you can edit in the “overview” section. shuffling the cards around can really help out, since you can basically write starting from the middle and expanding out in every direction needed.

I’ve found myself really liking the Notes app, in iOS on my iPad. It lets you paste in pics, type, even do some sketching in the notes. Also, it’s very well indexed. It’s also synced to my phone, computer, etc. So if I have an idea and I only have my phone, I can jot it down.

I'm using Milanote for make some World Building, but in some cases, it becomes too complex and hard to make simple things for my game, like mecanichs for battles etc. This video comes in the right time, thx for that, Adam 😁

There's a small group of us getting into game dev and we've been using notion for a wiki to get our ideas down. I hadn't heard of some of the software you listed out earlier on, I'll definitely be checking some out. Thanks!

Man, the soundtrack ! Cool video, great explanations, but the music is the best of all. Nostalgia!

Thank you so much for this video!! I’m always trying to be more efficient, and this helps a ton! Thank you 🙏🏽