Tools

Watch party / Streaming service

Talk-show style streaming facilitator, connects to twitch etc

Another Day is a writing app. Here are the rules: every day tomorrow becomes today, today becomes yesterday, and what was yesterday is forgotten.

Paste your text, find cliches!

Source-controlled collaborative text editor.

Create flow charts and diagrams.

OCR software that runs in your browser.

Excellent list of tools and resources for naming things, including brainstorming, vetting, cultural sensitivity, safety, etymologies and more.

As easy to use as a word document or bulleted list, and as powerful for finding, collecting, and connecting related ideas as a graph database.

Mind-map based note-taking app for visual/spatial thinkers.

Powerful and flexible writing environment, with virtual corkboard, outliner, and full screen writing.

Writing environment with a clean and intuitive interface, Markdown support, and projects/tagging.

Yarn Spinner helps you build branching narrative and dialogue in games. It’s easy for writers to use, and has powerful features for integrating your content straight into your game.

Describe your diagrams with a simple text language and automatically generate an image you can export.

Find a good time to meet with 2 or more people. Cuter than Doodle.

Use this tool to create unique, seamless, royalty-free patterns.

Penpot is the first Open Source design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams. Non dependent on operating systems, Penpot is web based and works with open web standards (SVG). For all and empowered by the community.

Make point-and-click adventures with your own text and artwork.

Amulet is a free Lua-based audio/visual toolkit suitable for small games and experimentation. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5, iOS and Android.

Bitsy is a little editor for little games or worlds. The goal is to make it easy to make games where you can walk around and talk to people and be somewhere.

Draw in a frame, and link to another using a colour palette. Web-based, exports to HTML.

A tool for drawing and collaging artwork to create small games.

Free and open-source engine for making 2D and 3D games. Excellent documentation, fully featured and multi-platform deployment options.

Open source, cross-platform 2D game library written in the Haxe Language and powered by OpenFL.

Well-established desktop tool for creating works of interactive fiction. Programmable.

The powerful scripting/markup language behind Heaven’s Vault, 80 Days and Sorcery. A language and editor. Unity plugin available.

An open source framework for rapidly building immersive 3D experiences in Lua.

Early-access platform that lets players and designers make, play, stream, and share tabletop role-playing games.

Plug-and-lay multiplayer networking for Unity

JavaScript game engine for making desktop and mobile html5 games.

A fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games. Intentional limited. Lua. [Free licenses available to DMG members, contact us]

A combination of an editor and a simple JavaScript library to create game without the cumbersome aspects of HTML5 development. Great for prototyping.

PowerQuest is a Unity tool for creating 2d point and click adventure games!

Open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine.

A tool for creating dynamic stories relative to a reader’s place, time and location (via the Foursquare API), weather (OpenWeatherMap) and more (custom feeds for recent news stories etc).

Visual novel engine with powerful scripting.

Draw an object, drag it onto the canvas, and add rules to make a game. Exports to web page.

Collage images into 3D worlds to explore.

Open source tool for creating interactive narratives that easily deploy to the Web. Big community. Web and desktop versions.

One of the most widely used cross-platform game engines.

A directory of weird game-making tools by Lee Tusman.

Free and open source web conferencing, especially suited to classes and presentations. This is what DMG uses!

Video + phone meetings tool for up to 250 users. Free, but consider the privacy issues.

Spatialized audio for up to 150 people. No download required.

Free and open source video meeting platform.

Tool to allow audience members to interact with a presentation anonymously and visually.

Online Town is a video-calling experience that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel and lets you walk in, out and around those conversations just as easily as you would in real life. It’s also fun.

Em wrote a series of posts on the technical architecture and experiential considerations that went into the highly successful Roguelike Celebration conference in 2020.

Already using the standard plan on Slack? You can start a live video call with up to 15 participants.

Video + phone meetings for up to 10 users – limited to 45 minutes. (Not affiliated with Uber.)

No-download, just-works video meetings tool for up to 4 users.

A free tool (invite-only as of Aug 2020 – ask a DMG person for an invite!) to create virtual rooms and backdrops and immersive presentations.

Online virtual RPG tabletop

Web-based pomodoro app you can use with just your keyboard.

Collaborative Whiteboard Program, vectors

Collaborative Drawing/Painting Program, medium functionality

Collaborative Drawing/Painting Program, robust functionality

A community managed lightweight code hosting solution written in Go. It is published under the MIT license. Free/open source alternative to Github.

Collaborative whiteboard program, mindmaps, etc.

A digital workspace for visual collaboration.

Lightweight web-based chat client that doesn’t require signup.