Resources

Bitsy, by Adam Le Doux, is a little editor for little games, worlds and stories. With two-color pixel art, simple rooms, characters to talk to and items to pick up, Bitsy makes it possible to create a game without knowing how to code. Its intimate aesthetic and deliberate constraints have generated a global community of creators who use it to explore autobiography, politics and playful poetry.

Twine, by Chris Klimas, is the go-to tool for creating nonlinear interactive fiction. With no code required, it lets you build branching "choose your own adventure" stories through a visual interface of connected nodes. It publishes directly to HTML, and everything created with it is free to use, even commercially. It was the hub of the 2012 "Twine Revolution," the moment when queer writers, activists and artists stormed video games.

Downpour, by V Buckenham, is a platform for artists who want to create and share small games and interactive stories from their phone, without code. Photos, images and text are linked to put together an interactive story in minutes. Inspired by Twine and Bitsy, its bet is radical: that anyone, with no prior experience and no computer, can make something interactively interesting in ten spare minutes.

Flickgame, by Increpare, is a minimalist engine for creating small games and interactive stories directly in the browser, without installing anything. The constraint is the method: 16 images, 16 colors per image. Clicking on a color takes you to another image, and that is how an entire nonlinear narrative is built. Ideal for a first project or for exploring the poetics of limits.

Signal is a completely free and open-source MIDI editor that runs in the browser, without installing anything. It lets you compose, edit and explore MIDI music with a clean piano-roll interface; it supports external MIDI keyboards, tempo and time signature editing, loading SoundFonts (.sf2) and exporting to WAV. It is not a full DAW: it is a tool for composing and sketching musical ideas quickly and openly.

Sokoban-style turn-based puzzles; the rules are written as visual patterns. Good for argument games in which the mechanics carry the thesis.

A multimedia notebook inspired by HyperCard: cards, buttons, 1-bit drawing. For interactive zines, archives and collages.

Branching narrative with better state handling than Twine.

Harlowe to get started; SugarCube for variables and saving; Chapbook for writing with the bare minimum.

Harlowe to get started; SugarCube for variables and saving; Chapbook for writing with the bare minimum.

Harlowe to get started; SugarCube for variables and saving; Chapbook for writing with the bare minimum.

Parser-based interactive fiction written in near-natural language. Harder than Twine.

Bitsy's successor, with more colors, layers and events. The next step for those who have already mastered Bitsy.

Scripts that add dialogue options, sound, saving and text-to-speech to Bitsy without losing its simplicity.

Block-based programming from MIT, with teaching materials. For workshops with children and teenagers.

A no-code 2D/3D engine that exports to web, mobile and desktop.

Drag-and-drop Game Boy-style games; they run in an emulator, on the web or on a real console.

Visual novels with readable scripts. For testimony and memory with illustration or photography.

A fantasy computer with code, sprite, map and music editors. A free alternative to PICO-8.

A full engine that requires programming. For collectives seeking technological sovereignty in the face of Unity.

A 2D framework in Lua for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. It works as a second step, when the group already wants to write code.

An HTML5 framework designed for mobile browsers. Useful if the workshop publishes on the web without anyone installing anything.

A Python library for 2D games. It fits where the school already teaches Python.

A 2D/3D engine with a visual editor and Lua, royalty-free. Exports to web and mobile.

A 2D engine with a visual editor and Catnip, a block language. It lets you move from blocks to JavaScript without changing tools.

The successor to Kaboom.js for web games in JavaScript or TypeScript. A playable prototype takes just a few lines.

"Point-and-click" graphic adventures. Useful for memory stories anchored in places.

Multiple-choice stories written in plain text and published in HTML. An alternative to Twine with its own web editor.

Text adventures and gamebooks without programming. Its support for Spanish makes it useful in writing workshops.

Choice-based interactive fiction with stats. It is worth reading the license before publishing or charging.

An engine for narrative and role-playing games with skill checks, inventory and quests. No programming required.

A visual novel engine that runs in the browser. Works are played without downloading.

Retro-style games with blocks or JavaScript from the browser. Works with schoolchildren who have already used Scratch.

UC Berkeley's block language. Useful for workshops that combine games and computational thinking.

Pixel art and animation in the browser, with no installation. Works on borrowed or library computers.

A free version of Aseprite for animated sprites.

A pixel art editor made in Godot; it also runs on the web.

Digital painting and illustration, with frame-by-frame animation.

A tile-based map editor. Useful for territorial cartographies and community maps.

Chiptune melodies in the browser; the song is saved in the URL.

Retro sound effects with one click.

More expressive effects than sfxr, free to use.

A music production workstation for more elaborate soundtracks.

Record testimonies, voices and soundscapes for documentary or memory games.

3D modeling and animation. For sets, characters or presentation animations.

Vector drawing. Useful for cards, boards, icons and posters.

Image editing. For retouching archival photos or preparing textures.

Collaborative interface design, by Kaleidos (with a branch in Spain). For sketching menus and screens as a group.

Music notation. Lets you transcribe the community's melodies for the soundtrack.

Random sound effect generators. sfxr was born at Ludum Dare in 2007; Bfxr is increpare's expanded version.

Random sound effect generators. sfxr was born at Ludum Dare in 2007; Bfxr is increpare's expanded version.

A collaborative sound database from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. It is also useful for teaching how to read licenses.

Free art for games. Each asset sets its own license, which must be respected.

Thousands of public domain sprites, icons and sounds. Lets you prototype without knowing how to draw.

More than 2,500 pixel art palettes and online tools. Gives visual unity to a Bitsy or GB Studio game.

4,180 icons in SVG and PNG. Useful for cards and tokens in prototypes.

Free typefaces for games and printed materials. Each family needs to be checked for support of accents and specific characters.

An engine for adapting board games to the computer, with more than 3,200 modules. Lets you play remotely or turn by turn via email or Discord.

A JavaScript engine for turn-based games with online multiplayer. Useful when a paper prototype moves to the web.

A virtual tabletop in the browser with user-created games. For testing prototypes with dispersed groups.

A virtual card table with private rooms. Supports custom graphics, dice and automated rules.

Design and print card decks from data. Speeds up successive versions of a prototype.

A Ruby-based language that generates cards in PNG, PDF or SVG from Excel or CSV. For groups with some programming experience.

Tips on paper, cutting, and assembling boards and boxes. Useful in workshops with few materials.

free; whoever publishes decides what percentage the platform takes, even 0%. It hosts web and downloadable games, as well as game jams.

a library by Paolo Pedercini (Molleindustria) for making games with p5.js in class. The current version of the library is maintained separately at p5play.org, under a different license.

A Flash emulator in Rust and WebAssembly, with extensions for Firefox and Chrome. Lets you play Flash newsgames from the 2000s; ActionScript 3 support is still incomplete.

Guidelines at three levels, maintained since 2012 by studios and academics. They work as a checklist for reviewing prototypes.

61 measures ordered by difficulty, designed around player profiles. Lets you review accessibility in Spanish with the group.

22 accessible design patterns. Helps discuss who is left out of a game.

A media outlet made by and for disabled gamers, with reference guides. It shows concrete barriers from the player's own experience.

Collaborative software translation. Useful for bringing a game into several languages, including Indigenous languages.

A Spanish-speaking text adventure community since 1988, with news from 2026. It organizes the CAAD Awards and maintains a wiki, forum and Discord.

Official list with groups in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Spain. Useful for finding local peers and mentors.

The official Godot 4 manual. Some sections are still in English.

An interactive course for learning to program in Godot without installing anything.

A course by Luis Canary (Pendulo Studios), published in June 2025. It walks through a 3D game all the way to exporting it.

An interactive guide by rumpel. The Bitsy wiki lists it as almost the only tutorial in Spanish; a comment warns that it is outdated.

A wiki hosted at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, with Bitsy and Twine tutorials. It organizes content on industry, development and teaching.

A presentation by Mila Aponte-González (UPR Río Piedras, 2023). It serves as a model for a nonlinear narrative workshop with practice and assessment.

A network of women and gender-diverse people in the Argentine industry since 2019. It organizes annual jams with preparatory workshops.

An interactive fiction authoring forum. For solving technical questions about Twine, ink or Inform.

It maintains Twine, IFComp, IFDB, the IF Archive and IFWiki, and has an accessibility committee. It gives grants to projects.

An open, recurring game jam.

An annual web game competition with a 13 KB limit. Teaches how to make lightweight games for slow connections.

A 2026 jam by OCCRP and the Fundación Gabo to turn investigative journalism into games. A model of partnership between the press and game development.

A 2026 jam with 529 role-playing games gathered in a charity bundle. It shows the jam-bundle format for fundraising.

A jam by Cinereach and Anima Interactive (SXSW 2024) on storytelling for justice, with a postcolonial subtheme.