Today I’m shipping Ludessy.
It’s a workspace for game designers that brings characters, items, quests, mechanics, levels, dialogue, and GDDs into one project, with live cross-references between everything. It’s free during open beta. You can sign up and start a project here.
If you’ve ever opened Notion to “set up a proper GDD,” then six months later realised your characters live in three different places, your quest design is in a Miro board you keep forgetting to update, and your balance numbers live in a spreadsheet nobody else opens, this post is for you.
Why I built it
Thirteen years of game design. Card games, strategy, trivia, sci-fi action, even a 2D adventure. Team sizes that ran from one person up to a full studio. Through all of them, one constant: the tooling fights you the whole way.
You know the feeling. You’ve got a perfectly-organised drive folder. Subfolders nested three deep, naming conventions you actually follow, the whole thing. And you still spend twenty minutes hunting for the “foot soldier balance sheet” before finding it as a tab inside an unrelated spreadsheet from eight months ago. GDDs nobody reads. Design decisions trapped in three different tools that don’t talk to each other.
I’d been through the cycle before. Google Docs becomes too unstructured, you migrate to Notion, things feel great for two months, then by month four you’re back to spreadsheets for half the work and a separate dialogue tool for the other half. Two years ago I started another prototype and told myself this time would be different. I’d structure it properly. I’d set up the databases up front. I’d treat the workspace like a real production environment.
It worked. For about ten weeks.
Then I renamed a major NPC. Three months later, a playtester asked me “wait, is Maren the same person as Lyra?” Notion’s @-mentions inside page bodies hadn’t propagated the rename. I found stale references to “Maren” in seven separate docs. The two names had drifted into being treated as different characters by everyone who’d read the GDD.
That was the moment for me. Why the hell is there no tool built for game designers? Game design isn’t a niche craft. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry. And yet we’ve spent decades duct-taping together productivity software meant for marketing teams and calling it good enough.
Don’t get me wrong, there are real tools out there. I fell in love with Articy: draft and Arcweave the moment I saw them. They’re excellent at what they do. But they’re specialists, not workspaces. The narrative lives in Articy. The dialogue graph lives in Arcweave. The character sheets sit in Notion. The balance numbers are in a spreadsheet. The references are on Pinterest. The concept art is on Drive or Trello. The schedule is in Asana. For a small prototype, that mostly works. For a real project? It’s half a dozen different rabbit holes someone has to keep in sync, and that someone is always a designer.
I started logging what I called “tool maintenance” time. Across two projects over six months, it came to roughly 80 hours wrestling tools into shapes they didn’t want to take. A working week per month, gone, not designing.
So I started building.
What Ludessy actually is
A specialised workspace for game design with five things that the generic tools don’t do:
Structured editors per item type. Characters, items, quests, mechanics, levels, and conversations each get a purpose-built editor with the fields and visuals that type actually needs. No more wrestling generic templates into something that vaguely resembles a character sheet.
Live cross-references everywhere. Type @ in any field, pick anything, get a live chip. Rename a character once. Every chip and live card across every GDD, note, conversation, and quest updates instantly. The “wait, who’s [old name]?” question stops being possible.
GDDs that are actually fun to read. Embed any character, item, quest, or mechanic as a live card inside any GDD page. With portraits, stats, and previews visible right there. Visual, browseable, click-through. Edit the source once; every card updates everywhere. The wall-of-text doc nobody opens dies; what replaces it is a document people genuinely want to read.
A real Conversation Graph editor. Branching dialogue rendered as an actual node graph with conditions, flags, and a side panel that auto-collects every flag and tag used in the graph. Scales to 30+ branches without becoming spaghetti.
Game-specific GDD blocks. Twelve block types in total. Six of them built for game work in particular: Input Scheme, Object Reference, Color Palette, Progress Tracker, Timeline, Sound List. Plus the standard text / callout / image / gallery / table / divider blocks for everything else.
There’s also a Project Canvas where every item floats in spatial relationships you draw, a Map Editor where you drop pins on uploaded world maps, and a backlinks panel on every item that tells you every place it’s referenced. The full list is at ludessy.com.
What it costs
Completely free during the open beta. Three of the four tiers cost nothing right now: Free, Indie, and Team. The beta is going to run for a few months while we polish based on real-world use, so for most of you reading this, the answer is: it costs zero.
After the beta ends: Indie kicks in at $5/month for unlimited projects. Team is $12/seat/month for shared workspaces and async collaboration. The Free tier stays free forever for one project with all editors.
Studio is the one paid tier from day one at $25/seat/month. Built for mid-sized studios that need admin dashboards, role permissions, and audit logs. If that’s not you, the beta-free path covers everything you’ll need.
Full pricing breakdown: ludessy.com/#pricing.
What’s already built vs what’s coming
Already shipped (v1.0): Project Canvas, Map Editor, Conversation Graph, GDD Editor with 12 block types, structured editors for 6 item types, 35 item icons with 6 rarity tiers, 9 mechanic categories, @-mention chips, live Object Reference cards, backlinks panel, JSON export, async multi-user collaboration. See the full v1.0 changelog.
Coming this quarter: real-time collaboration (cursor presence), comment threads on items, role permissions for Studio tier, audit log, AI design assistant (optional, never on by default), public read-only sharing for GDDs, six more GDD block types.
On the slate for the year: SSO for Studio, public API + webhooks, plugin SDK. See the full roadmap, which is public and updates based on what subscribers ask for.
Who this is for
Yes if: you’re a solo dev, an indie team, or a studio of 1-20 people, and you’re in pre-production on something serious. Ludessy is built end-to-end for pre-production. If you’ve personally felt the gap between “good general productivity tool” and “right tool for this job,” this is the tool.
Probably yes if: you’re at a larger studio (50+ people) and you want every designer, producer, and stakeholder to access the design documentation in one place instead of scattered across Notion, Confluence, spreadsheets, and your shared drive. But: at that scale you almost certainly have your own tooling for engine integration, asset pipelines, and production workflows. Ludessy doesn’t replace any of that. What it replaces is the scattered design-doc layer that sits on top of all of it. If that’s the gap you keep feeling, it’s a yes.
Skip if: you’re a pure narrative studio with budget for Articy:draft (they’ve been doing dedicated narrative tools for fifteen years and they’re excellent at it).
Who built this
Hi. I’m Bondo. Before Ludessy I was the CEO of Cryptyd Games, a mobile-games studio, where I ran product development as a designer and producer. Across that role and the years before it, I’ve shipped 9 games. That’s where most of the pain points that shaped Ludessy came from. Not from one frustrating prototype, but from hitting the same broken tooling cycle on every single project, for over a decade.
Ludessy itself was built by me alone. One month of free time. No outside funding, no team, no marketing budget. I built it with heavy AI assistance. That’s the only reason a one-person, one-month build was even possible. This is a real bootstrap, not a euphemism for one.
What I’m committed to: helping indie developers as much as I can. The Free tier is real, and it stays that way. The open beta runs as long as it needs to. The roadmap is public. Feedback goes straight to me, and I read all of it. Indie devs supporting other indie devs early is what makes this kind of project work; I’m hoping to pay that forward.
What to do next
If you want to try it: Start free at app.ludessy.com. One click, no credit card. Create a project, type @ somewhere, and see the cross-reference chips fall into place. The “is this real?” moment usually arrives within five minutes.
If you want to join the community: the Discord is open. It’s where indie devs using Ludessy hang out, where feature requests get talked through before they hit the roadmap, and where I’m active most days. We’re building a community in parallel with the product. Free to join. Come say hi.
If you want to read more before signing up: the Notion review post, the 7 best tools comparison, and the GDD template post cover most of the “why this exists” argument with more depth than I’m giving here.
If you want to give feedback: email hello@ludessy.com, use the feature request form on the roadmap page, or just drop a message in the Discord. I read everything.
If you want to help spread the word: the indie dev community is small. A retweet, a Discord-server share, a “hey have you seen this” to a friend who’s been complaining about their tooling. All of that matters more than you’d think for a one-person launch week.
Thank you for reading this far. Now go build something.