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The Tool Jam

In May of 2021, Léon hosted the Tool Jam for people to make 'a drawing tool, an animation tool, a music tool, a writing tool, a character generator, an idea generator, a game engine, a new programming language, an mp3 to jpeg file converter, a spelling mistake generator, an MS Paint clone, or anything else.' And boy did people deliver. Here are some of my favorites.

• The image map game maker (right) is a very exciting little tool: it allows you to create simple point and click games that use html image mapping
• Dynamic Dynasties generates a long series of political and personal moves from powerful families that rule the lands. I like this as a strong starting point for specific worldbuilding.
• Image Stitcher is exactly what it sounds like and a very very useful thing to have if you want to combine a long series of images for any reason
• escreveapa.ga the simple notepad delights me in it's simplicity
• Four Unity customization tools by Teamon: Custom Toolbar, Build and Changelog Manager, Screenshot Sequence Tool and a Game Template. I wish Unity worked on my computer so I could take advantage of tools like these
• This Manga Generator which is weirdly powerful browser tool and supports some super fine-grained animation
• This Heightmap Extruder feels like a game in and of itself - it can build models from heightmap images. This makes my brain ping in a really pleasant way and I kind of want to explore how to use this function in a larger context or a game
• This Fake Words Generator amuses me because every once in a while it'll make a real world. My personal favorites so far are "fez" and "baxup"
• I haven't yet been able to use the Open Voice Modder because I am on a mac, but I am looking forward to playing with it next time I can use windows
• PNGEverything makes me laugh hard, because it's absolutely useless
• Image 2 Spritesheet will definitely be useful for any projects I have with lots of sprites. I definitely want to keep file sizes down
• Having the organizational functions ofLancelot could be very useful, especially with all of the loose games I have floating around my laptop now
• Tools like the simple work tracker are great because they only does the one thing I need them to do - this also makes me want to learn Python!!
• ChatPlays gets me hype, not because of what it is but because of the fact that it gives me an example of how to make my own soundboard! I love soundboards!! And I could just make one in Godot??? Incredible

That's all for today, thanks for tuning in.