puzzle dependency charts

I found a very interesting blog post of Ron Gilbert describing his methods of good game/puzzle design.
I think it´s essential. Have a look!

http://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts

I can recommend yED (free) for such charts

I know we´re living in a digital world, but...

I can recommend a blackboard. ;D

You don´t have to open it. It´s there. Confronting yourself with your project day and night.

Hm, I don't know what is such a program for - apart from making your drafts nice.
I have to check all conditions and dead ends for myself also, haven't I? Does this programs have something like an AI to correct me on my way or show me some illogical or insolvable errors?

its there to make diagrams. They don't have any AI built in because the content of your diagram is not analyzed. You have to think yourself, but organizing your puzzles and displaying it in diagrams can help a lot to check yourself if you made logical errors.

For adventure games it can be used to show up your puzzles in a graphical way and display all requirements to fullfill specific conditions and dependencie:

Also these programs often have a "tidy up" function to sort your boxes

yED & MindMaple lite are both nice free cloud / mind map type software. yED is 100% free. MindMaple lite is freeware version of the full software but it's nice enough - I preferred it over yED.

Having said that, the best program you can get is Articy Draft, but it's a bit pricey & I recommend buying it in a sale on steam if you can (it's usually cheaper if you buy it in a bundle with articy 2 dlc, I paid around €99 for it).

@ Damiano: I too use a board mounted above my desk, although mine is a whiteboard instead of a blackboard. Very useful for quickly jotting down notes - especially considering I only have to look up from my screen to see them.

P.S: articy draft has lots of export options to directly export your data into various game engines. Unfortunately VS is not one of them, but it does have support for condition switching, so you can prototype your scene layouts & various other things in it, besides writing your story / dialog scripts & organizing everything inside of a flow diagram - it does need a decent computer to run it though.

Today we had a discussion about speaking files and dialogs in Visionaire. I can export all texts of ONE person to give it to a speaker. Well. But what about the person "on the other side"? If you have a theatre test or a studio synchronisation the speaker has a person opposite to speak with (mostly some non-professional helper). I didn't found a way to export TWO dialog partners from Visionaire fitting together in the right way. The texts are sorted by ID (doesn't help really), so I copied them from Visionaire dialog editor into notepad manually... PoEdit doesn't make prints... :-( It takes a long (wasted) time... OK, I can make voices without this comfortable feature, but it helps.
Can I do this with one of this programs? Making hierarchical dialogs to test their logic and print it out to check emotional effects?

Machtnix