Is it worth using a mind mapping app for a single indie developer?

Just wondering if such a program can help organize and keep track of the development for a single person.
Or is it more fuss to just design the whole thing, and never keep up with updating it?
What is your experience?

 

Mind mapping apps are best for brainstorming -- for example, coming up with a story or gameplay ideas. You start with a single idea, such as a story kernel (e.g., "dog rescues girl"), and add links to related ideas as they come to you (e.g., "girl is lost in forest", "fairies live in forest", "forest on fire", "girl is lost in snowstorm", etc.). Mind mapping is useful for any creative process.

To organize and track the development of a project, even a solo project, you probably want to look into a project management app instead. Two apps that are designed for videogame development are hacknplan.com and codecks.io. Some people use Trello but, while it has its uses, in my experience it doesn't scale well for videogame projects.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I had no idea what to look for so any of those two will come in handy. I'll check them out!

 

As a single person, you may think that you don't need that much planning or documentation, but when there's only you, there's also no one else who may remember if you have forgotten something and talking to people helps to make things clearer and imprint them into memory. So yeah, you may want to look into whats there for small scale project management.

 

Yeah. I definitely get that. Although right now just the debugging portion throws my schedule off about 1000%

 

I like to put internal design stuff on a private wiki. VisualStudio.com lets you create one for free. I've used several OSS wiki packages for this as well, but they are more hassle than you really need. For a place to put things like public release notes, I've been putting that on a blog site. Again for free.