Table of contents 📚
Sound 🔊
Code 👩💻
Sharing 🤼
Inspiration/Misc 😲
Tips - A collection of tips from Wyatt Cheng on game jams
Davinci Resolve - One of the best free video editors. Maybe if you want to do some video focused game or something? I don’t know don’t spend time making a trailer for a jam game is all I’m saying but this is here if you want it.
Phil’s LD 41 Keynote - Quick, entertaining and super helpful. Other keynotes have a lot of information but none have quite the same entertainment value as that which comes out of Pixel Prophecy
Game Idea Generator - Pretty much does what it says!
UI Ideas - Stuck on your user interface? Peruse some of these
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Sound 🔊
Sound-Effects
ChipTone - Tool for generating 8 bit chip tones.
Bfxr - Desktop only (until JS version comes out) 8 bit sound effect generator
Sxfr/jsfxr - Web based sound 8-16 bit effect generator
Audacity - Great audio editor for general needs
Reaper - Much more powerful of the two but has an intersting situation regarding licenses, cost and legal iffyness. TLDR it’s not realy ‘free’ per say so keep this in mind!
Ideas for Audio Recording - A list of objects that can be used to make certain sounds
Music
CakeWalk - Powerful Digital Audio Workstation for people wanting more granular control
BandLab - Web Based DAW geared towards beginners by the same (sorta) people as CakeWalk.
LMMS - A lightweight DAW for intermediate users
Ardour - Yet another feature packed DAW, also well suited for single file audio editing
Bosca Ceoil - 8 Bit music maker (Online version is not online at the moment)
Tonnoform - Easy to use customizable desktop 8 bit music composer
BeepBox - Another web based 8 bit music maker
Abundant Music - Procedural Music Generator
SunVox - Modular music synthesizer
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Code 👩💻
IDE
Microsoft Visual Studio - A powerful defactor IDE for all languages
Microsoft Visual Studio Code - A lightweight and fast Electron based IDE for many languages
Eclipse - Powerful Java and Python IDE (More languages are supported but those are the ones it’s known for)
Sublime Text - Super lightweight and fast code editor
Bug fixing 🐛
Grepper - A extension for your web browser that focuses on answering your coding questions
Stack Overflow - You should know this one: Probably the best Q and A site for all your coding problems
Ludum Dare - Don’t forget you can always ask questions on the Ludum Dare website
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Art/Level-Design 🎨
Making Art
Pixel/Voxel Art
Magica Voxel - Tool for making 3d Voxel Art
Piskel - 2D Sprite editor
Aseprite - 2D Sprite editor MUCH better of the two, but one of the only things on this list that is NOT FREE
LibreSprite - 2D Sprite/Pixel art editor and animator
3D Modelling
Blender - 3D Modelling, compositing, video editor and so much more swiss army knife
Image Editing
Gimp - Super powerful image editor
Photopea - Less powerful image editor but runs in your browser
Drawing
Inkscape - Vector image editor
Pen and Paper - Don’t forget pen and paper is a great tool for art as well! Sketch something throw it on your printer or use your phone. There are plenty of modern aps and even native support for scanning documents. Then you can use something like GIMP to edit the resulting image into something you like.
Krita - Digital painting program
Fire Alpaca - Digital painting software
Spriter - Tool that allows for convential keyframe animation of sprites, rather than frame-by-frame
Level Design/General Design
Figma - Figma is a web-based vector graphics editor and prototyping tool
LDtk - Hugely powerful 2D Level Editor
Tiled - 2D level editor with a focus on tilesets and pixel art
NetRadiant - Brush based level editor
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Sharing 🤼
Giphy - Turn video into gifs in your browser
Screen2Gif - Powerful desktop gif recording
Carbon - Share beautiful pictures of your code
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Preparing ⏮
Unnofficial Ludum Dare soundtrack - The best way to perapre-y!
Twitch streams - Check out all the best game dev twitch streams
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Planning ⌚
Collaborative planning/idea sketching
Jamboard - A simple collaborative whiteboard
Google Docs - A collaborative word proccessor that runs in your browser
VS Live Share - Quickly and easily collaborate with teammates to mockup code
Git - A super powerful version control that should have it’s own section. Use whatever clients you are comfortable with, CLI. Tower, Github Desktop and whatever hosting you like, GitHub, GitLab and many more.
Task organizing tools
Trello - Kanban board style task tracking
Should I participate in LD? - A great resource for people who are undecided ;)
Time tracking
Google Calendar - A simple easy to use calendar for planning visually how long things will take
Working Hours - Simple punch in punch out time tracking for windows