Hey all,
I'm making an adventure game, and for years I mapped my puzzle dependencies in OmniGraffle. Great app, but it's a general diagram tool that doesn't understand puzzle logic, it's macOS only, and it isn't cheap. I kept bending it to track what unlocks what, where branches open and collapse, and what the player can work on in parallel.
So I built the thing I actually wanted: something made just for adventure game puzzle charts, and free. It's called DepDoodle.
It keeps that clean OmniGraffle style canvas but with puzzle semantics built in. Puzzle, gate, and reward nodes connected by labeled dependency arrows. One click Auto Layout. A Pacing view that turns your graph into an availability timeline so you can spot linear stretches and pacing pressure. Structural checks for cycles, missing roots, dangling leaves, and missing closers. Groups for acts, characters, or threads. Saves to a plain readable file and exports to PNG, JPG, PDF, and SVG.
It's completely free, open source (GPL 3.0), and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
It's early and I build it alongside my own game, so feedback and feature requests are very welcome. If you're also an ex OmniGraffle puzzle charter, I'd love to hear how it works for you.
Cheers!
