Best three programs?

Heck i mostly use word.

As for PnP games there are tons of free ones listed at BGG and plenty of geeklist about them like this one

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/40630

or you could skip that and pay me for one of mine.

http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=758

Hi,

What software do you use to create maps of a city or a country?

Thanks

I can't recommend PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS enough. Think of it as PHOTOSHOP LITE. For less than $100 [heck, for less than $50 on ebay for older versions - got my PE.2 copy for $20 there], you get all of the bells and whistles necessary for creating great looking stuff. AND it's so easy to use that I can do it! There are even how-to books for around $5 [including shipping]. If you don't have $500+ for a graphics program, this should be your baby!

If money isn't a huge issue then I would go with:

Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Obviously Gimp, Inkspace and (LaTex/Open Office I guess) on unix systems are free and workable, but I found the software design that goes into making Adobe products very usable makes them worth the money. A good game is well tested and designed, and so is good software. (Inkspace is a nice idea but really seems to be a beta version of a program and has some really cludgy interface problems).

If you are into self-publishing, or at least self promotion, and you purchase Adobe Creative Suite products then you get things like Dreamweaver and Flash which allow you to easily and professionally create a web presence to blog about your game.

(btw I've found some of the mechanics and data structures in some of the higher end graphics programs, such as, 3d animation software to be inspiring for game design when you look deeply into them ) Organizing layers, filters, and masks in photoshop involves strategic thinking too!

For cards, I use nanDeck. Interestingly enough, I also use nanDeck to prototype some hex tile games. I use Graphpap.exe (prints different kinds of graph paper) for design layout of boards and to see how some tile games would work out. I use Notepad (or Notepad++) to put together my rules. If I want formatting, I create web pages. Sometimes I write a quickie Java applet to prototype tiles, although not so much anymore. Get the feeling I'm cheap? I am. BTW, I do mostly card games and tile laying games all with abstract graphics instead of images. I find it useful to focus more on gameplay than how it looks.

Good luck finding the three best programs for you. When you find them, how about trying them out by participating in the Game Design Showdown? :-)

I use Photoshop for my card development, and I have some really good cards coming out for a game me and a friend are creating (which will be posted soon on here, it's almost finished.) I also use word for my rule books, etc, and a word plug-in that throws them into a PDF for me.

Other than that, it's striaght up hard work and dedication that really makes it worth while.

I checked your Web site, Mitch, and Morpho Board looks interesting. But you don't list system requirements anywhere! I run Mac OS X, and I need to know whether a piece of software will run on my system.

Your screen shot definitely looks like Windows, so I suspect it's for Windows only—but maybe you wrote it in Java, in which case it might run on nearly any machine.

Please, everybody, don't assume that the entire world runs Windows! Maybe you're only interested in coding for the great majority, but have a little thought for those of us on other systems, and at least tell us up front whether we can run your stuff. And even Windows users will want to know things like disk, memory, video hardware, and system version requirements.

Thanks!

Sorry, Rick! I will correct that oversight. It is a Windows-only program. I tested it on Windows 98, XP and Vista.
It's still in beta, so I'm not sure if it will bloat up later.

Cheers,

Mitch