10 Apps That Game Designers Use

I’ve noticed a few people started using the search function on this website to search for Apps for Game Design. I’m guessing my previous articles on Mobile Game Design attracted a few readers interested in the topic. So let’s talk about this. What apps do game designers use?

Your Answer Upfront:

In this article we’ll talk about the Apps (Software Programs) that I make use of as a Game Designer. We’ll cover everything from Word Processing, Art Programs, Wireframe and Diagram Tools and even Game Engines for prototyping. Note that I’m going to explain how exactly I make use of those tools and why. I’ll then talk about some industry standard apps that other designers make use of. By the end of the article you should have a pretty good idea of what apps game designers make use of to design and create mobile games!

The Game Design Process

Before we talk about the apps I use to make mobile games, I want to talk a bit about the way I design and create my own games and the games for my clients. I won’t go into too much detail since I covered this topic heavily in the article titled “What Does A Game Designer Actually Do“, but a small intro to the way I work will help first time readers.

I’m a mobile game designer that specializes in System Design and Rapid Prototyping of Gameplay Mechanics. As such, my usual tasks involve doing design documents, detailing how the systems and gameplay mechanics work together and testing out my designs by building an actual playable prototype.

We can identify two parts of the design process that I normally use:

• The Ideation Phase – where I create and define the idea
• The Prototyping Phase – where I validate the idea itself

Some apps or software are used across both phases while others are only use in their specific parts. So let’s talk about each phase separately, list the apps that I rely on in said phases and explain why and how I use them.

Software for Ideation

Google Docs – design documents

In the ideation phase, I find myself spending a lot of time in word processing and mockup tools. When I was younger and more novice in the industry I would jump head-on and start prototyping directly without setting any targets, goals and “being honest” with what I wanted to achieve. I was chasing a “novel and incredible idea” through a chaotic process.

As the stability of my business became a more important factor I “grew older in my mentality” and I pivoted towards outlining what I want to achieve. As such I begin by writing the “sometimes dreaded” game design document. In fact, I don’t actually call it “The Game Design Document” and instead refer to it as the “Macro Design Document” or the “Pitch Document”. Why?

Because, if I start writing a huge 50-100 page document before I prototype my idea I’ll be “lying to myself” assuming I am 100% confident my idea is amazing from the get go. In simple terms, what good is there to spending 2 months writing an incredible detailed document only to later discover the idea isn’t fun?

Instead, I take a page out of Mark Cerny’s “The Method” talk from Dice Summit 2002, and I create a small 5-10 page document that outlines the following:

• The goal of the game
  • What type of game is it?
  • What should the game achieve?
• The game’s setting
  • Where does the game take place?
  • Is it futuristic? High Fantasy? Low Fantasy? Medieval Setting? Abstract?
• Who the main character is and how does he control
  • Is it a human character? Is it a vehicle?
• How the Camera Works
  • 1st person? Third Person?
• What are the main systems in the game and how the Core Loop works
• How do I plan to monetize the game

This document is more than enough to keep me on track during the prototyping phase. It’s incredibly easy to lose focus and start chasing the next best idea (especially when you’re just starting out) and having a bit of a plan in place to guide is incredibly helpful.

I actually wrote an entire post about making a Game Design Document that’s made based on Cerny’s Method. In that post you can see how the Game Design Document itself looks like and download a template to use for yourself.

Note that this approach doesn’t only apply to games. It can be used for everything related to game development. I use the same structure when I create Systems for games. Or tools, the same approach works for virtually everything.

Google Docs is perfect for writing these types of documents, especially since you can export your final document as a Web Page or PDF for distribution, or allows other people to leave comments and add their own details (perfect for when dealing with clients).

Balsamiq – create wireframes and UI mockups

I’ve only started to use Balsamiq in the past year or so. Previously I relied on a couple of wireframe and UI prototyping tools like EasyMockup (MacOS and iPad) or I jumped head first to prototype the UI directly in Unity. Recently I’ve gotten a lot of design only freelancing opportunities and going the extra mile with Unity just didn’t cut it in terms of effort put in (time) vs monetary compensation. In some cases, doing the UI directly in Unity hindered the result.

I purchased a desktop (Mac) Balsamiq license for around $80 and never looked back. If you ever used EasyMockup, Balsamiq is a more refined version of it. It’s fast, extremely fast, and when you are getting paid per design/concept, speed equals more money.

It’s an extremely easy tool to use, available cross platform, and an incredible amount of help for any designer out there.

Procreate – if I need to doodle some concepts

ProCreate was recommended to be the first purchase I should make on my iPad. I’m not an artist, I can barely draw, but when I have a meeting with a client or I want to do a rough logo or map mockup? I grab my iPad and sketch something bad really fast.

There’s not much to say about ProCreate other than you really need an Apple Pencil to use it. I tried ProCreate with 3 different third party pens and none of them came close to Apple’s 2nd generation pencil. The latency and responsiveness that comes with the official pen cannot be matched and the tilt and pressure sensor is amazing.

ProCreate is great for doing rough map layouts, shadow silhouette’s and quick ui sketches or flows. It’s your portable whiteboard. And if you’re even a little bit decent when it comes to art? An amazing piece of software to draw your concepts.

Gimp – photo editing, references and mood boards

I have a huge love/hate relationship with GIMP. I grew up using Adobe Photoshop since the old days but when Adobe moved towards a recurrent subscription I decided to drop Photoshop. I tried using Paint.NET as an image editing program for a while, but it’s not available on Linux or Mac (Linux has a reimplementation called Pinta but it’s nowhere near ready to be used). Sometimes, I even use my original copy of Photoshop 3.0 for MacOS 7.5 (20 years old now) when I need to do Pixel Art. I use a Mac Emulator but sometimes I run it on original hardware.

So I went for GIMP. It allows me to crop, scale, transform and export images to various formats. I made games for Nintendo DS and the Commodore 64 and edited their sprites and graphics in GIMP while also exporting in various legacy file formats to be included in those platforms. However, I can’t say I really like it. The amount of extra clicks I have to do to get things done is asinine at best. But it’s extremely powerful, fast and compatible with all my computers.

If you have a Photoshop license or subscription? Use that. If you’re in a pinch, you can use Gimp!

Google Sheets – data analysis / economy breakdown / game analysis

Google Sheets is my favorite spreadsheet application and I use it constantly. I take notes in it, I break down game economies in it and I even wrote complete game logic in it. It’s powerful and versatile and the fact that anyone can access your spreadsheets with the proper link makes it extremely useful for collaborating (especially since it keeps a revision history).

When I start thinking how a game works I create a tab for all the features that I want. Character? Make a sheet for the character. Add the stats in. Controls? Make a tab for gamepad, one for keyboard and mouse and one for touch controls. Make a list of all actions possible and what buttons you want to use.

Vehicles? List them and put their “stats” in. Maps? List them all including their desired length. Get all the data out of your head and into the spreadsheet. It will help you spot issues that can arise or help you organize the chaos that it’s in your head during ideation.

The spreadsheet ends up becoming a mind map and with a bit of work, it can also become your game’s database for features and logins that you can later on import during the prototyping phase. 80% of my games have a spreadsheet linked to Google Docs that I can edit at any point to tweak things and then import into the game. Saves time on compilation, debugging, testing and even designing.

What if I want that car to go faster or to obtain it sooner during gameplay? All I have to do is change a value in a sheet, press download in my game and I’m good to go!

Notes App – quick notes during research

Apple’s notes is amazing and does what it’s supposed to do really well – it allows you to take notes. It works across all my devices and if I have an idea it’s there and available for me to write it down. And when I get to my workstation, everything that I wrote down is instantly available.

I use it often to plan encounters or features. I wrote a game for a case study on this blog and planned the entire gameplay sequence on my phone while riding the subway (you can read the case study titled “How Many Organic Downloads Can Your Game Get Without Marketing?“). Before I wrote a single line of code, I knew exactly how the battle should take place.

And then I prototyped the game and tuned but most of the planned had been done on that subway ride. Some people prefer to use OneNote or Dropbox sync with .txt files. Whatever works for you is fine, but make sure it allows you to take a note and access it later, without issues faster.

When you have an idea for something? Write it down, marry it to an action and come back to it later.

Software for Prototyping

There’s a bit of crossover between the software that I use during the ideation phase and software that I use during the prototyping phase. Gimp and Google Docs/Sheets are extremely useful. The same photo manipulation skills that I use during ideation can help me make and edit textures for my models, logos for the game or images for the backgrounds or user interface. And Google Sheet, just as I mentioned earlier, can be used as a database for the entire game’s progression.

The rest of the tools? Let’s talk a bit more about them.

Unity Game Engine

I wrote a few articles about Unity as an engine and the negative sentiment some mobile gamers have against it. The truth of the matter is that Unity makes game development easier. It solves a ton of the hurdles of setting up and making a game and its asset store makes finding art and mechanics a breeze. A ton of people started using it with a singular goal of publishing as many games as possible, the result being a huge and oversaturated market of inferior games.

Note that Unity isn’t responsible for this huge over saturation. They same result would have happened regardless of the engine used. If you want to learn more about how exactly games made with Unity flood the market check out my article titled “Why Do Gamers Hate Unity“.

On the other hand, I wrote an entire article on “Why So Many Games Are Made With Unity” where I explain in quite a bit of detail why Unity makes my life so easy when it comes to making and developing my own games and prototypes.

The basic idea for why game developers love Unity is this:

• It saves development time by offering a lot of commonly used features like Pathfinding, Navigation, Lightning, Post Processing, Cross-platform build support, Rendering, Input (touch, peripherals) and a lot more stuff that not all games rely on.
• It allows devs to share and retrieve various assets needed in a game in an extremely convenient way (via its asset store).
• The cross-platform build support is a boon (and sometimes, a bit of a curse for devs who don’t actually do Quality Assurance on their games) that saves thousands of dollars (even more) in porting and research costs.
• There’s a ton of tutorials, documentations and freely available code to learn (or copy) from.

Look at it this way. Let’s say making a game from scratch would have taken me 6 to 8 months. I’d write the rendering engine, handle audio, player input, user interface and everything nitty gritty that comes with writing a game. Unity already has everything handled for you so you can just, mostly, focus on the logic of the game. Those 6 to 8 months that I mentioned earlier? It would take me about 3 or 4 months to do that.

And, in fact, I did just that. My Steam game, Space Mercs (a massive single player space combat game) took me just 3 months to design and develop starting from scratch with Unity.

Now, if a full game takes me 3 months to develop, how long would you think it takes me to prototype a mechanic, a vertical slice, or a small prototype with it?

This is why I wholeheartedly recommend Unity to any game designers out there. You don’t have to become an expert game programmer to use it and learning just a tiny bit of coding in Unity can help you a lot more than you would ever expect it.

Version Control – Git or SmartSVN

I’m not a huge Git or SVN fan. I still think version control isn’t handled smart enough but I’ll take what I can get in this case. If you’re a solo game dev or designer, you might think you don’t need version control. And you’d be wrong.

The amount of time I had to go back to an earlier prototype version because things just didn’t pan out is too damn high, as the meme used to say.

Version control is important and it saved my beard in more than one occasion. In fact, the lack of version control completely killed all the updates for the game mentioned earlier, Space Mercs. At the beginning of the 2020 event, I was doing all my work on a singular Linux laptop that I had since 2012. Good enough and fast enough for my needs.

All my client projects had their own version control software and servers setup but my little indie games? I worked alone. I had a networked server with Ubuntu running and I kept .zips of the game’s source code backed up there. I bet you can see where this is going…

I had a recent backup of the game uploaded to my little Ubuntu NAS and multiple backups over the past few months. I went to install a different distro on the laptop to check for some shader issues some of my players had on Manjaro. Wiped the drive, installed Manjaro and went to retrieve the data from the NAS. To my surprise? The NAS was completely dead.

I sent both NAS hard drives to a data recovery service in February of 2020 and then 2020 hit back hard. The data recovery company? It closed down and my hard drives remained in limbo.

If only I had used a Version Control system I could have finished and shipped the first update to the game. This little mistake cost me about 7000 euros (estimated based on target sales lost).

So, the next time you think you don’t need any VCS (Version Control System) think again. The last thing you want is to have something amazing and then loose it. A little bit of GIT or SVN goes a long long way.

Audacity – editing, recording and exporting audio

The last important tool in my arsenal is Audacity. It’s an audio editing tool that I use to cleanup my voiceovers, trim and edit sound effects or create new ones.

It’s free, open source, and extremely powerful. I used it for podcasting and I used it to compress music and sound effects for my games. It’s so powerful that I used it to export audio files that I later used in a game I was working on for a Macintosh from 1987.

It has amazing plugins built-in that support effects (Reverberation, Echo) as well as plugins that can help you reduce the noise and normalize the sound. It’s extremely easy to learn to use while offering a ton of depth.

One of my favourite tools to use, especially when recording voice overs, for a client pitch or demo.

Where To Next?

This is the fifth article in my series of articles about being a Game Designer in the Mobile Gaming Industry. You can read the other articles in this series:

• What Does A Game Designer Actually Do
• What Is The Difference Between Game Design and Game Development
• Do Game Designers Need To Code
• How Does A Game Design Document Look Like? + Free Template

I write extensively about the mobile gaming industry, their tactics and how greed influences a game’s design. I believe that you might be interested in more articles about the mobile gaming industry. So if you want to stick around, you can check out “What’s the difference between Fremium, Free To Play and Pay 2 Play“, “Why Voodoo Games Are Popular” and “Why Do Mobile Games Take So Much Space“.

There’s also a monster post (about 4000 words) that answers the question: “How Hard Is It To Make A Mobile Game“. It goes in depth with actual examples on how Experience, Resources and Financials affect the difficulty of developing and releasing new mobile games!

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