A design tool where the design is playable the same day

A design document is a record of what you believed before you played it. Most of it turns out to be wrong, and the ones that are wrong are wrong in ways nobody could have predicted from reading.

What makes a design better is the cycle: change something, play it, notice how it feels, change it again. Every hour you can cut from that cycle is worth more than any amount of planning.

That is the only thing this app is trying to do for design. Not generate ideas, not write a document, not evaluate your pitch. Shorten the distance between an idea and a version you can play.

Describe a mechanic and Director 1 writes the GDScript for it inside your project. Not a mockup and not pseudocode. A working version in the game, which you press play and try.

That means you can test the idea that sounded clever and find out in twenty minutes that it is not. Killing an idea in twenty minutes instead of a fortnight is most of what good design process is.

It also means you can try the version you would not have bothered building. A lot of design is unexplored because the cost of exploring was too high relative to the odds.

Half of game design is not rules at all. It is where things are. How far apart, how visible, in what order the player meets them, what they can see from where they start.

That is done by hand in the builder. You place terrain, buildings and encounters directly and then walk them. There is no describing step, because for space, describing is slower than doing and less accurate.

Systems and space have to be designed against each other, and this is why the two halves sit in the same app. A jump height is a level design decision and a level layout is a movement decision.

A desktop app for Mac and Windows, built on open source Godot, producing a real Godot project on your disk. The game runs locally on the copy of Godot bundled with it.

Building needs an internet connection because Director 1 and world data come over the network. Playing what you built does not.

Free to download with a free plan. Indie is $10 a month and Pro is $50 for more usage. Prototyping is cheap in usage terms, which suits the way design work actually goes.

A good habit that this kind of tool makes cheap: build the mechanic on its own, in an empty world, before it goes anywhere near your game.

A grappling hook in a bare room tells you whether the grappling hook is good. The same hook dropped into a half-finished level tells you nothing, because you cannot separate the mechanic from the level around it.

Ask for the isolated version, play it for ten minutes, and decide. If it survives that, it is worth designing a level around. If it does not, you found out for the price of an afternoon rather than a month.

Design goes down dead ends and sometimes reverses out of them. The version you abandoned three weeks ago is occasionally the one that was right.

Because the project is a folder of ordinary files, keeping a copy before a large change is trivial, and it makes you braver about large changes. Most design timidity is really a fear of not being able to get back.

It is a habit rather than a feature, and it costs nothing. Copy the folder, name it after what you were about to try, and then try it properly.