The shots of the last Ludum Dare 44 died down, but the urge to make games, to hone my skills still does not leave me, and I think many. Looking through the main page of the online event, I came across an interesting post where the author asked himself the question of compiling a toolkit that helps developers (teams) create their game masterpieces. In the article, the author set himself the goal of assembling into a single list a set of tools that pseudo-randomly generate various resources for your game, ranging from a fixed palette of colors to the simplest chiptune-like background music and character sprites.

Under the cut translation of this note, with a few comments and notes from myself.

In his search, the author was guided by several requirements to the tool:

• he must make the content random, unique and unique whenever possible;
• it should run in a browser;
• The tool can be used with any engine without any obstacles.

Game Name Generator

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

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

Coolors

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

Example palettes below:

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

Pixeldudesmaker

Characters also do not interfere with your game. Pixeldudesmaker generates random funny pixel dummies. When you have selected a combination that suits your preferences, you can export a table of sprites with three built-in animations: idle animation, running and jumping.

How do you like these cute pseudo-random characters? Perhaps, both placeholder stubs will fit perfectly in order to run in a prototype, and then replace it with already high-quality manual content.

Cavegen

Need a cave map? Why not try to build your story with Cavegen ? The application uses cellular automata algorithms to create caves, which you can then export as json or png .

Jfxr

The game also needs some sound effects. Probably everyone knows the classic sfxr , which generates retro sound sfxr . But, as it turned out, there is also an implementation of this classic javascript tool called jfxr .

Beepster

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

From the translator: I played with this tool myself and recorded tracks for my game that are similar to what follows below on the link that leads to the generated track, uploaded to SoundCloud : https://soundcloud.com/xnfss34b6ajq/dingdungdungdung

Missing tool

One thing is missing from this list - a tool for creating tileset . That is, the basic elements of building a level (whether it be a platformer or a top-down walker). That is, not tilemap s, but real tile sprites. The author searched for them everywhere, but could not find any of them that 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 a tool. It will not be something spectacular. This is just an idea.

Below is a link to the project repository. It should be noted that the author has advanced quite well in a short period of time.

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

Demo link: https://quinten.imtqy.com/random-tileset-generator/

Link to itch.io: https://supernapie.itch.io/random-tileset-generator

Licensed on tilesets generated: CC0

Epilogue (from translator)

This is the whole list of selected tools. It may well be expanded, and it is not necessary to apply the same rigorous criteria as the availability of the web version. Perhaps, having read this translation or the original, they will be able to help increase this list in the comments, sharing their findings, the best tools, asset generators (sounds, animation, rigs to 3-D models, background generators for the game, and so on). Let's enrich each other's toolkit together to do even more cool and crazy things in Game Jam! Also, you can share your ideas (links to GitHub or GitLab for example) and ideas, which are not enough tools in terms of tools for rapid prototyping of your Game Jam game.