Comments on a few tools.

[packbat]

Someone on the fediverse shared a link to everest pipkin's massive "Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup", and I decided to go down the list and talk about the ones we've touched.

Firstly, the ones we've actually tried to make something - or even succeeded at making something - with:

• Bitsy: Pixel art walking-simulator-esque game engine. Very good set of constraints for our own inspiration purposes. Documentation is lacking in our experience, but if you are doing what it does best (an interactive experience where you move from pixel art screen to pixel art screen interacting with points of interest and reading corresponding bits of text), it makes it very easy to make and share games. We've published two: A memory of a library and A small packet.
• Twine: The classic choice-based interactive fiction game engine. Constraints are pretty broad, although it defines a pretty good standard style that's basically an electronic gamebook a la Choose Your Own Adventure or Endless Quest. Very good documentation. I don't think we've ever actually finished anything with this (game books are implicitly book-length, and we struggle with completing projects at that scale), but we know folks who have; a lot of people find it very accessible.
• Inform: The classic parser-based interactive fiction game engine. Constraints didn't feel particularly inspiring when we tried Inform 7 ages ago, but the documentation worked well for us. Again, we didn't finish anything; it has that same problem of scale as Twine, but the interface is more programmerish.
• PICO-8: The most popular fantasy console, a low-res, lightweight Lua-ish dev environment. Excellent constraints for our own inspiration purposes on all levels: graphics, sound, and computation. (The way we put it: you can do anything, but not very much of it.) Good documentation, albeit with a few frustrating gaps. Definitely the creative tool we've used most, although everything we've finished has been pretty small scale; actually, we do a lot more writing of music in PICO-8 than anything else lately. We've occasionally posted said music to the #PicoBatMusic tag on our fediverse account; leaving out a janky tech demo we made for a game jam, we've made Rain Gif (an art cart we're really proud of) and Driftself (a depressing autobiographical kinetic essay on race).
• That one open-source raster art program whose name is an ableist slur: Screw that noise. We might try Glimpse at some point, but we're not even linking to the other one.
• Paint.net: Free raster art program. No particular shaping of constraints here - it's not for that. Documentation is adequate. Works, but not great - but it works, and we've been able to do everything we've wanted to do, more or less.
• Strike: Black-and-white dither paint tool. Restriction to a simple and awesome rendering style. Very little documentation; I think it relies on pre-existing familiarity with similarly simple art programs like MS Paint. We've only really done a single test picture with it, but it was super fun to work with and produced a really nice image.
• Audacity: Very basic audio editing software. Limitations reflect a small scope more than artistic design. I think the documentation's fine, haven't really looked at it. It does some basic audio things and probably a lot more than we've ever done with it.
• LÖVE: 2d framework based on Lua, accoring to the site. (We usually call it Love2d.) No designed constraint that we're aware of. Documentation is good. We actually made a game jam game using LÖVE and a library we didn't understand - Recolored Platforms (the non-Windows builds probably don't work) - which was ... fine? It's a solid thing and you can do stuff with it, but it's not as convenient as a lot of the other tools mentioned in the list.
• Notepad++: Text editor. Strictly plain text with automatic code formatting for various programming languages, which makes it extremely lightweight for non-WYSIWYG text editing. Documentation exists, but we haven't actually looked at it. It's great, we love it, we use it all the time, it has a word counter (open the View menu and select "Summary...") and tabs and autosave and weird awesome little features like renaming open files without having to close them from the File menu.
• domino: Simple mind-map viewer-editor. Lovely constraints: brief text, low-res images, laid out in cards in staggered columns. Documentation is scant, basically just covering the basics. A little weird to work with, but a lovely little thing to draw out nonlinear spiderwebs of thoughts in. A handful of notes was made in domino.

Secondly, the ones we've looked at but never tried to create in:

• Flicksy: ...just not an art style that appeals? If the style appeals to you, it's probably really easy to work with in its limited way and kind of fun.
• Mosi: ...there's no blank slate. We like the idea of a Bitsy-like with actual documentation and more features, but the game throwing pre-gen worlds into our editor without asking just makes us feel like we don't have any space to work in.
• TIC-80: Again, no blank slate. You start a new program and it comes pre-filled with a page of code and a sprite and probably some other stuff, we already noped out before going any farther. Also, it doesn't have any CPU restrictions like PICO-8 does, so it doesn't keep you from overloading people's computers, which feels like a big shortcoming.
• Medieval Fantasy Town Generator: It pretty? We've considered using it as the basis for a town map for a D&D game, but never actually gone past thinking about it.
• Blender: We haven't looked at it in ages and never figured out how to use it when we did, so we can't say anything about it.