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[AuthenticKaizen]

This is something that has been tormenting me of ages.
I find no media that is really good enough for what I want to do.

So this will sound wierd, I have considered coding together a 3D enviornment, like any other 3d game, where you can place nodes, each node will exist in 3D and can be represented by any model, but it can be focused on in 2D and contain multiple 2D nodes and linke to other 3d nodes. Since nodes can be moved around and have a mesh, it's easy to create a "theme" area.

The 2D nodes are the basic ones, text, image, sound. Top this of with a search functionality and it would be awesome.


I have a very imagefocus imagination so that is what I have figured out I would need so far. BUT it doesn't mean I have had time to implement it.

It sounds a lot like those 3d desktop things where you can shuffle around documents etc on a desk and nail them to walls, but it's not, i don't want to restrict it to a desk and physics etc, it need to be in a free 3D enviornment to actuall be possible to organize things as you want.

Am I crazy?

maybe something like 3d topicscape?
(there's a free student version)
i haven't tested it yet but i will check it out someday...


i'm currently using xmind

moreover here is some more mindmap related stuff
http://www.collegedegree.com/library/college-life/99-mind-mapping
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept_mapping_and_mind_mapping_software

[simono]

  * whiteboard (no money: try the magic whiteboard)
  * pen & paper
  * tomboy



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomboy_(software)

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i use 70% pen and paper, 10% mediawiki, 10% notepad, 10% zoho calendar. pen and paper for general planning, mediawiki for the design document, notepad for the game's wishlist, and zoho calendar for the schedule / to-do list.

[Tiderion]

No one tool will solve all problems.

Obviously loose paper of any type is necessary to draw out impromptu designs. There is no substitute.

I prefer Open Office. I use documents to do detail work. Spreadsheets are better to keep and organize lists. You can switch over to other formats if you like but those two plus paper works for me.

I do also like to keep highlighters and big lined notecards on hand too. Just in case. I would also like to buy a big white board but something tells me to wait until I move next before I do that.

[Jrsquee]

  * whiteboard (no money: try the magic whiteboard)
  * pen & paper
  * tomboy

This is very sensible.

Personally, I always keep a small/thin paper-backed notebook in my back pocket, and I always keep a pen on me too. Good for remembering things.

[J. Kyle Pittman]

I use a notebook and pen for plotting out things I'm actively working on at the moment. For things I'm going to get to soon, I keep notes on a whiteboard. If I don't have access to either, or for things that I need to revisit in a bit or when I need to make wordier notes, I'll just send myself an email. I haven't yet found a perfect solution for long-term tracking. I was using ToDoList for a while, then I switched to Toodledo, and more recently, I've been writing my own issue tracking web app. Partly I think I'm spoiled from using JIRA professionally, and partly I just haven't made a habit of checking any long-term tracking database, so nothing's really stuck.

[Kurai]

I mostly use Notational velocity+Simplenote (so I can take notes on my iPhone/iPad also) and an awful lot of moleskine Notebooks. One of them is a daily agenda, and I'm trying to jot down a game mechanic a day.
To organize stuff on paper I found useful this post.

[HiVE]

Lots and lots of separate, opportunistic sheets of paper. Recommended? No.

That said, one very useful layout is to arrange all your game's progress checkpoints (i.e. player progress) as a directed graph, like a circuit with AND and OR gates, especially if you're working on a more open-ended, multiple-paths type of title. It helps enormously to be able to tell in an instant if one event requires another (or several, or which...), or what the relative complexity (depth from starting node) of different events are, or if any events suffer from a much easier 'exploit' alternative path to them... that sort of thing. Boxes and lines!

Although again, that would probably be better on digital media than pulped tree, it tends to go spaghetti very quickly. Depends if you like spaghetti.

[_Tommo_]

For random ideas I don't use any tool at all, I think that a worthy idea is one that is at least interesting enough to be remembered for a while.

Then, when I decide to work on an idea and the scope of it grows, I use to drop some sketches and a notepad sheet to see if everything fits together: often you try to write a description of a "big" idea, only to discover that it couldn't even work

[dantheman363]

I usually use pen and paper. But if I don't have access to those materials, then I will type up a little note in my phone so that I don't forget what I was thinking about.