Keeping Everything In One Place

I am currently preparing to move country which requires a lot of organising. Firstly I have a list of tasks that I need to do before I move and then I also have to gather all of my things that I will bring with me. As with moving house, developing board games takes a lot of organising too. From ideas, tasks in progress, playtests and different resource lists there is a lot to keep track of. There are a lot of different tools you can use to organise all of this. As of now I have been using a number of different tools to track all of this. I track my ideas on Evernote, I keep data on play tests in google sheets and I had kept different bookmark folders for different online resources. It is a bit disjointed and sometimes I have to transfer information across one platform to another. However, I recently discovered a new tool that I could use to organise everything together in the one place.

A recent video from Ludo Lodge highlighted the benefits of using Notion for game designers. In the video he points some basic advantages of Notion, such as how easy it is to organise all of your different pages into whatever system you wish or the ease of creating different databases that can all link together. You can also create templates of pages so anytime you make a new project it’s quick and easy to have everything you want set up. The main advantage for me though is that you can use it to keep all your information in one place. One of the drawbacks I found about using Notion is that it could take a lot of work creating new templates for all the data I already have to transfer everything over. Especially since I don’t know exactly what kind of functionality is possible. Thankfully, Ludo Lodge did a follow up video where he also provides a template that you can copy and edit to how it works for your process.

The two main benefits of using notion over anything else for me is firstly the amount of information you can link to from just one page. In his example project page you can link whatever different databases you want to it. One the one page you can have links to your tasks list, a database of articles you used to research the theme of the game or you can link to the rulebook. On top of this you can have the page display any tasks that you have marked as todo or in progress. The second benefit for me is how in depth into playtesting you can go. The template already has databases set up so you can track each individual playtester and game they play from their score, which character they used or if it was their first time playing. From using the databases you can filter it to see how long your game plays with 2 players compared to 4 or if a particular power is winning all the time. I definitely suggest watching the specific playtest section of the video if you want to see more on that.

I will not start transferring everything from all of my different tools into Notion. It might take a while to get everything over but ultimately I feel it will be worth it as I will now only have to look in one place if I want to find something instead of having to remember which app I took note of it in.

How do you keep everything organised?