I’m going to be designing some software over the next few months that’s going to be geared towards video game design. The main intention is make designing a video game simpler and more organized than it would be in, say, a word document. Sure, there’s probably some software out there like that, but this has two advantages.

1. Its slightly cheaper (meaning free)
2. It has the words DON’T PANIC in large, friendly letters on its cover.

Well…actually no on that second one.

3. It will have features that are more awesome, because I think of crazy things.

So here’s what I want to know: what are some things that you guys think would make designing and making video games easier for you? This is assuming that you’re working with some form of RPG Maker.

One of my ideas:

Story Plotting Software
It’s not for actually writing a book, but plotting it out. This is a huge one for me. I’ve never really found any software for this that was actually good, or more than a word document with index cards.

What I have in mind for this is something that lets you easily store character bio’s, create a plot line (looks like a time line) that you can add story points to and move them around, and the actual text of the story points functions like a wiki. You can add new pages by highlighting a word and selecting Add New Page. Makes it easy to highlight key ideas, go to them, write some ideas, and come right back to what you were doing before.

I'm liking the Hitchhiker reference.

In any case, I'm more of a "manual do it myself" kind of a guy (complete with excel grids), but I can see some use on a tool like this, especially where the planning stage is concerned.

There's a tool currently available called StoryForm:

http://save-point.org/thread-3595.html

It provides a sort of planning guide from writing down stories, ideas, map possibilities, characters, etc.

And then Nick Palmer has an excel Game Design Doc/Spreadsheet:

http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/support/tutorial/rpg-maker-vx-ace

Maybe if there was a way to streamline this so people would not have to download multiple tools, that would be great. The biggest challenge most people face involve databasing and game balance, so perhaps if there was a way to spit out some unique formulas (for VX-Ace), that would also be great, or a faster way to calculate enemy stats based upon a player's current level, that would also make things easier in the planning stage.