The shots of the past died out Ludum Dare 44, but the desire to make games, hone their skills has not yet left me, and I think many. Looking through the main page of the online event, I came across an interesting post where the author wondered about compiling tools to help developers (teams) create their game masterpieces. In the article, the author set out to put together a set of tools that pseudo-randomly generate various resources for your game, from a fixed color palette to a simple chiptune-like background music and character sprites.

Under the cut is the translation of this note, with short comments and notes from myself.

In his searches, the author was guided by several requirements for the tool:

• It should make the content random, as unique and unique as possible;
• It should run in a browser;
• the tool can be used with any engine without any obstacles.

Game title generator

The first thing you need is the name of your project. It can be quite difficult, but Game Title Generator gives you over 10 million different offers. Just don’t get carried away very much with the “Create” button, because during the time of Jem you still need to manage to create a game.
Below is an example of the generated names of future gaming masterpieces:

Infect Of Stipulation
Blast Of Privilege
Rad Godzilla Wranglers
Legendary Math Trivia
Annigilation and City

Coolors

Do not use a boring black background # 000000for your game with white text #FFFFFFand blue game objects # 0000FF. Instead, create a cool, balanced color palette with Coolors. You can create your own palette of 5 new random colors by simply pressing the spacebar. If you like one particular color, you can fix it and then generate 4 new colors that suit it. There is also a button (pound icon) that generates all the shades.

Example palettes below:

The palette can then be exported in a number of different formats, including PNG, PDF, SVG, or to share with friends a direct link to the designer palette.

Pixeldudesmaker

Characters will not interfere with your game either. Pixeldudesmaker generates random funny pixel doodles. When you have selected a combination that suits your preferences, you can export a sprite table with three built-in animations: idleanimation, run and jump.

How do you like such cute pseudo-random characters? Perhaps, as stub placeholders, they will fit in to break in the prototype, and then replace it with already high-quality manual content.

Cavegen

Need a cave map? Why not try building your story with Cavegen ? The app uses Cellular Automata algorithms to create caves, which you can then export as jsonor png.

Jfxr

The game also needs some sound effects. Probably everyone knows the classic sfxrone that generates retro-style sound bites. But as it turned out, there is also an implementation of this classic tool on javascript, called jfxr .

Beepster

Last but not least, what your game needs is some music. Try Beepster . You can create some unobtrusive melodies with it. The only drawback is that you will need to record the result yourself.

From a translator: I played around with this tool myself and recorded tracks for my game similar to those shown below on the link leading to the generated track, uploaded to SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/xnfss34b6ajq/dingdungdungdung

Missing tool

One thing missing from this list is the tool for creating tilesets. That is, the basic elements of building a level (whether it be a platformer or top-down walker). That is, not- tilemaps, but real tile sprites. The author searched for them everywhere, but could not find any of them, which were also executed as web applications. So, perhaps, there is still a "gap in the market" here, and this week I really want to try to create such an instrument. It will not be something impressive. This is just an idea.

Below is a link to the project repository. It should be noted that the author made quite good progress in a short period of time.

GitHub: https://github.com/Quinten/random-tileset-generator

Demo link: https://quinten.github.io/random-tileset-generator/

Ссылка на itch.io:https://supernapie.itch.io/random-tileset-generator

Лиценизя на генерируемые tileset-ы: CC0

Послесловие (от переводчика)

This is a complete list of hand-picked tools. It can very well be expanded, and it is not necessary to apply the same strict criteria as the availability of the web version. Perhaps those who read this translation or the original will be able to help increase the list in the comments by sharing their findings, the best tools, asset generators (sounds, animations, rigs for 3-D models, background generators for the game, and so on). Let's enrich each other's tools together to do even more cool and crazy things on Game Jam! Also, you can share your best practices (links to GitHub or GitLab for example) and ideas, which are still not enough in terms of tools to quickly prototype your Game Jam game.