Ask a junior game designer what tools they use and they'll usually say Unity or Unreal. Ask a senior designer the same question and they'll list eight things — none of which are game engines.
A game engine is where your game runs. A game design tool is where your game gets designed. Those are two completely different activities, and conflating them is one of the most common mistakes new designers make. This guide explains what a game design tool actually is, the categories that matter, and how to build a stack that makes you a faster, clearer designer.
TL;DR — Key Takeaways
- A game design tool is any software that helps you document, prototype, model, simulate, or communicate a game's design — before or during development.
- Game engines are development tools, not design tools.
- There are six core categories: documentation, whiteboards, prototyping, systems/economy design, balancing, and LiveOps.
- Different game types need different tool stacks — a narrative RPG and an F2P mobile game have almost nothing in common in their tooling needs.
- Economy-heavy and live games need a dedicated economy design tool. A spreadsheet is not enough.
What Is a Game Design Tool?
A game design tool is any software that helps a game designer define, communicate, test, or refine a game's design — its rules, systems, economies, flows, and content. It is not the software that builds or ships the game. It is the software that helps you figure out what to build before and during the time you're building it.
The distinction matters because most game designers underinvest in design tooling. They write a design doc in Google Docs, do their balancing in a spreadsheet that breaks after three weeks, and prototype flows in their head — then wonder why development keeps circling back to decisions that should have been settled earlier.
Good design tooling creates a single source of truth for game decisions. It makes invisible thinking visible. It lets you simulate consequences before they ship.
The 6 Categories of Game Design Tools
1. Documentation Tools
Documentation tools are where design decisions live in written form. This includes game design documents (GDDs), feature specs, system overviews, content databases, and design wikis.
What they're for: Creating a shared understanding of what the game is, how it works, and why decisions were made.
Common tools: Notion, Confluence, Google Docs, Coda.
What to look for: Structure, searchability, and ease of linking between documents. A GDD nobody can navigate is a GDD nobody reads.
Where they fall short: Documentation tools record decisions. They don't help you make them. You can write a perfectly formatted GDD for a broken economy system — the doc won't tell you it's broken.
2. Whiteboard and Visual Thinking Tools
Before a design becomes a document, it usually becomes a diagram. Whiteboards — physical or digital — are where designers map core loops, sketch progression systems, plan content hierarchies, and run early workshops with their teams.
What they're for: Visual thinking, early-stage system mapping, team alignment sessions.
Common tools: Miro, FigJam, Excalidraw, Mural.
What to look for: Speed. Whiteboard tools should be frictionless. If it takes five minutes to set up a board, you'll stop using it.
Where they fall short: Everything on a whiteboard is manual. There's no data, no logic, no simulation. A diagram of your economy system looks correct until you actually run the numbers.
3. Prototyping Tools
Prototyping tools let designers create low-fidelity representations of a game's user experience — usually focused on screens, flows, and UI interactions rather than underlying systems.
What they're for: Testing player-facing flows before they're built. Onboarding sequences, store layouts, menu structures, tutorial flows.
Common tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Marvel, Axure.
What to look for: The ability to link screens and simulate basic interactions. Good prototyping tools let a non-engineer share a clickable flow with a developer or producer without needing a build.
Where they fall short: Prototyping tools are surface-level by design. They show you how the game looks to a player, not how it works underneath. A beautifully prototyped store screen can still ship with a broken economy behind it.
4. Game Systems and Economy Design Tools
This is the category most indie designers underinvest in — and the one that causes the most expensive problems later.
Game systems design tools help you model the underlying logic of a game: resource flows, currency systems, progression curves, loot tables, crafting systems, and reward structures. Economy design tools are a specialized subset focused specifically on virtual economies — how currencies are generated, how they're spent, how items move through the system, and how player behavior interacts with all of it.
What they're for: Designing and testing game systems before (and during) development. Understanding how your economy behaves under player pressure, not just on paper.
Common tools:
- Spreadsheets (Google Sheets / Excel): The default. Good for static models, bad for simulation and scale.
- Machinations: Node-based visual tool for resource flow diagrams and system simulation.
- itembase: Purpose-built platform for game economy design and simulation. Designed for F2P, mobile, and live games where virtual currencies, items, progression systems, and LiveOps events need to work together. Lets you simulate how your economy behaves over time — not just how it's structured on paper.
What to look for: The ability to model your actual game objects (items, currencies, events) — not just abstract flows. And the ability to simulate player behavior against your design, not just calculate static outputs.
Where spreadsheets fall short: Spreadsheets calculate. They don't simulate. They show you the expected value of a gacha pull, but they can't show you what happens to your premium currency supply after 10,000 players play through your first season. For any economy-heavy game, you need a tool with a real simulation layer.
5. Game Balancing Tools
Balancing tools help designers tune numbers — combat values, difficulty curves, progression pacing, drop rates, economy ratios. This overlaps with economy design but focuses more on feel and fairness than on systemic behavior.
What they're for: Making sure the game is the right difficulty, that progression feels rewarding, that combat numbers make sense, and that no single strategy dominates.
Common tools: Spreadsheets (again), GameAnalytics for post-launch data, custom internal tools at larger studios.
What to look for: Visual feedback on curves. A table of 200 enemy stats is hard to reason about; a chart showing how difficulty scales by level is immediately interpretable.
Where they fall short: Most balancing happens reactively — after players complain. Proactive balancing, where you simulate player behavior before shipping, requires a tool that actually models the player, not just the numbers.
6. LiveOps Tools
LiveOps tools help designers plan, execute, and analyze the ongoing operation of a live game — seasonal events, limited-time offers, battle passes, promotional bundles, push notifications, and AB tests.
What they're for: Managing the game as a service after launch. Planning what happens, when, and why — and understanding the economy impact before it goes live.
Common tools:
- Airtable / Notion: For event calendars and content planning.
- Braze / OneSignal: For push notifications and player communication.
- GameAnalytics / Amplitude: For post-launch analytics.
- itembase: For simulating the economy impact of live events before they ship — e.g., what a double-drop weekend does to your currency supply, or how a new bundle affects your IAP conversion over the next 30 days.
What to look for: The ability to connect planning with consequence. Most LiveOps tools tell you what happened after the fact. A simulation tool tells you what will happen before you commit.
How Game Type Affects Your Tool Stack
Not every game needs every category. Here's how the stack shifts depending on what you're building:
| Game type | High priority | Lower priority |
|---|---|---|
| Narrative / story game | Docs, prototyping, whiteboard | Economy tools, LiveOps |
| Puzzle / arcade mobile | Prototyping, balancing | Economy simulation, LiveOps |
| F2P RPG / strategy | Economy design, balancing, docs | — |
| Idle / clicker game | Economy simulation, balancing | Prototyping |
| Live service / GaaS | Economy design, LiveOps simulation, analytics | — |
| Battle pass game | Economy design, LiveOps planning, docs | — |
If your game has a virtual economy — any game with currencies, items, progression gating, or live events — economy design tools are not optional. They're where the most consequential design decisions get made.
The Tool That's Usually Missing
Across all of these categories, the most common gap for indie and mobile designers is a dedicated game economy design tool.
Most designers start with a spreadsheet and never upgrade. Spreadsheets are fine for simple static models, but they break down quickly when your economy has multiple currencies, interconnected systems, and live events that interact with each other. They don't simulate. They don't visualize behavioral dynamics. And they turn into unmaintainable messes the moment another designer touches them.
itembase was built to fill this gap. It's a game economy design and simulation platform — not a generic system tool, but one built specifically around how live game economies work: items, currencies, progression systems, event structures, and player behavior modeled together. Designers use it to design economies visually, simulate how players move through them, and test LiveOps decisions before they go live.
If you're building a game with any kind of economy layer, it's worth exploring: itembase.dev
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a game design tool?
A game design tool is any software that helps a game designer document, prototype, model, simulate, or communicate a game's design. This includes documentation platforms (Notion, Confluence), visual thinking tools (Miro, FigJam), prototyping tools (Figma), systems and economy design tools (itembase, Machinations), balancing tools, and LiveOps platforms. Game engines like Unity and Unreal are development tools, not game design tools.
Is Unity a game design tool?
Not primarily. Unity and Unreal Engine are game development and runtime tools — they're where you implement and run a game. Game design tools are what you use before and during development to figure out what to build: how the systems work, what the economy looks like, how the UI flows. Some rapid prototyping happens in engines, but treating an engine as your primary design tool leads to expensive rebuild cycles.
What tools do game designers use?
Most game designers use a combination of tools across different categories: Notion or Google Docs for documentation, Miro or FigJam for visual thinking, Figma for UI prototyping, Google Sheets or itembase for game balance and economy design, and Airtable or analytics platforms for LiveOps. The exact stack depends heavily on the type of game being built.
What is the best game design tool for economy-heavy games?
For games with virtual currencies, items, progression systems, or live events, itembase is purpose-built for game economy design and simulation. It's designed specifically for F2P, mobile, and live service games where a spreadsheet isn't sufficient for modeling how the economy will actually behave under player load.
Do indie developers need game design tools?
Yes — arguably more than large studios. Indie developers don't have the safety net of large QA teams or the runway to rebuild systems that shipped broken. Good game design tooling lets a small team make confident decisions early, which is the most leverage a solo developer or small indie team can get.
What is the difference between a game design tool and a game engine?
A game engine (Unity, Unreal, Godot) is software for building, running, and shipping a game. A game design tool is software for designing the game — its rules, systems, economies, and flows. Design tools are used to make decisions; engines are used to implement them. Most professional designers use both, but they serve completely different purposes.
Build Your Design Stack
If this guide made you realize you're missing a tool for your economy or live game design work, itembase is a good place to start.
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