Part design tool, part motivational tool the Tiny Game Designer Tool is built out of love and passion for games and game design. We sincerely hope this will be useful for someone!

Tiny Game Design Tool is a small, portable booklet created in order to help game designers to come up with cool ideas and get started with a project in a very short time. It was built out of the great Pocket Mod , a tool that allows you to make small booklets to organize your work.

It's free, it's fun, it's awesome. Do you need more? (Actually, don't go and sell it back, please. We made it with ♥)

The road to awesomeness. Or: how you will learn to stop worrying and use this tool.

One. Emotion, mechanic and theme So, in order to start you should decide what kind of emotion you want to evoke in your player. Then you shall decide which core mechanic, according to you, will empower that emotion in the best way. What is a core mechanic? Think of it as a verb describing the main action the player will do in your game: maybe collect? Or run? Or chase? Or escape? Just add the object to the verb (for example: "collect fruit" or "run from sheeps") and there you are. This will be your core mechanic, so stick to it! The whole game should revolve around that one core idea. Games are not just mechanics, though. Choose a theme which supports the emotion you picked. The theme could be an environment (for example: a space facility on mars) or an abstract setting or a mood (a gloomy space with colored waves). Now, you have just set the general mood for your game!

Two. Main character Here comes the hero of our game. Draw a picture, choose a name and describe it in a nice and concise way. Then choose one or more powers. These powers should have something to do with the chosen core mechanic. For example, if your game revolves around jumping, maybe the main character should be able to wall-jump or to double jump. Maybe this would be a collecting game, so an inventory ability should be great for you. What if your character could have the ability to make other character jealous of each other? Powers can get really silly. Experiment! Remember, this is just a first draft. Keep some possibilities open while shaping a certain personality for your character. Oh, and don't force yourself to think about humans or other living creatures. What if your character is a stone? Or maybe a star shape? Try to think outside the box!