Tools
Streaming
Kast
Watch party / Streaming service
Streamyard
Talk-show style streaming facilitator, connects to twitch etc
Writing
Another Day
Another Day is a writing app. Here are the rules: every day tomorrow becomes today, today becomes yesterday, and what was yesterday is forgotten.
Cliche Finder
Paste your text, find cliches!
Draft
Source-controlled collaborative text editor.
Draw.io
Create flow charts and diagrams.
Online OCR
OCR software that runs in your browser.
Onym
Excellent list of tools and resources for naming things, including brainstorming, vetting, cultural sensitivity, safety, etymologies and more.
Roam
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.
Scapple
Mind-map based note-taking app for visual/spatial thinkers.
Scrivener
Powerful and flexible writing environment, with virtual corkboard, outliner, and full screen writing.
Ulysses
Writing environment with a clean and intuitive interface, Markdown support, and projects/tagging.
Yarn Spinner
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.
Planning
Diagram.codes
Describe your diagrams with a simple text language and automatically generate an image you can export.
Lettuce Meet
Find a good time to meet with 2 or more people. Cuter than Doodle.
Graphics
Art & Design
Pattern Generator
Use this tool to create unique, seamless, royalty-free patterns.
Penpot
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.
Game Making
Adventure Game Studio
Make point-and-click adventures with your own text and artwork.
Amulet
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
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.
FlickGame
Draw in a frame, and link to another using a colour palette. Web-based, exports to HTML.
Flicksy
A tool for drawing and collaging artwork to create small games.
Godot
Free and open-source engine for making 2D and 3D games. Excellent documentation, fully featured and multi-platform deployment options.
HaxeFlixel
Open source, cross-platform 2D game library written in the Haxe Language and powered by OpenFL.
Inform
Well-established desktop tool for creating works of interactive fiction. Programmable.
Ink / Inky
The powerful scripting/markup language behind Heaven’s Vault, 80 Days and Sorcery. A language and editor. Unity plugin available.
LÖVR
An open source framework for rapidly building immersive 3D experiences in Lua.
Multiverse
Early-access platform that lets players and designers make, play, stream, and share tabletop role-playing games.
Normcore
Plug-and-lay multiplayer networking for Unity
Phaser
JavaScript game engine for making desktop and mobile html5 games.
Pico-8
A fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games. Intentional limited. Lua. [Free licenses available to DMG members, contact us]
Pixelbox.js
A combination of an editor and a simple JavaScript library to create game without the cumbersome aspects of HTML5 development. Great for prototyping.
PowerQuest
PowerQuest is a Unity tool for creating 2d point and click adventure games!
Puzzlescript
Open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine.
Relative Fiction
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).
Ren'Py
Visual novel engine with powerful scripting.
Sok-stories
Draw an object, drag it onto the canvas, and add rules to make a game. Exports to web page.
Sok-worlds
Collage images into 3D worlds to explore.
Twine
Open source tool for creating interactive narratives that easily deploy to the Web. Big community. Web and desktop versions.
Unity
One of the most widely used cross-platform game engines.
Weird Game-Making Tools
A directory of weird game-making tools by Lee Tusman.
Meetings & Presentations
BigBlueButton
Free and open source web conferencing, especially suited to classes and presentations. This is what DMG uses!
Google Meet
Video + phone meetings tool for up to 250 users. Free, but consider the privacy issues.
High Fidelity
Spatialized audio for up to 150 people. No download required.
Jitsi
Free and open source video meeting platform.
Mentimeter
Tool to allow audience members to interact with a presentation anonymously and visually.
Online Town
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.
Roguelike Celebration MUD
Em wrote a series of posts on the technical architecture and experiential considerations that went into the highly successful Roguelike Celebration conference in 2020.
Slack
Already using the standard plan on Slack? You can start a live video call with up to 15 participants.
UberConference
Video + phone meetings for up to 10 users – limited to 45 minutes. (Not affiliated with Uber.)
Whereby
No-download, just-works video meetings tool for up to 4 users.
mmhmm
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.
Playing
Roll20
Online virtual RPG tabletop
Productivity
Pomoday
Web-based pomodoro app you can use with just your keyboard.
Collaboration
AWW App
Collaborative Whiteboard Program, vectors
Aggie
Collaborative Drawing/Painting Program, medium functionality
Drawpile
Collaborative Drawing/Painting Program, robust functionality
Gitea
A community managed lightweight code hosting solution written in Go. It is published under the MIT license. Free/open source alternative to Github.
Miro
Collaborative whiteboard program, mindmaps, etc.
Mural
A digital workspace for visual collaboration.
Tlk.io
Lightweight web-based chat client that doesn’t require signup.