Blog
Notes from the workshop
of game design.
Templates, frameworks, and honest opinions about the craft of building games. And the tools that help you build them.
Ludessy is live. Here's what it does, and why I built it.
Thirteen years of designing games taught me the tooling was wrong. I built the workspace it should have been. Free during open beta, live today.
Notion for Game Design: An Honest Review After Two Years
I used Notion as my primary game-design tool for two years across two projects. Here's where it shines, the four specific places it breaks for game work, and the workarounds. Ranked by how long they actually lasted before falling apart.
The 7 Best Game Design Document Tools in 2026 (Tested With a Real GDD)
I took a single vertical-slice GDD. 47 characters, 80 items, 23 quests. And ported it into seven popular tools. Here's how each one actually performed on speed, search, structured editors, cross-references, collaboration, and price.
The Complete Game Design Document Template (with the actual template, in full)
Every section a GDD should have, the question each one answers, and the three mistakes most teams make in each. Plus the full template inline, copyable, with a worked example for a fake vertical slice.
Why Generic Tools Break for Game Design
Two prototypes. Nine months. Two different tool stacks. The same failure pattern in both. A manifesto, sort of, about why game design has a structural mismatch with general-purpose productivity software.