Tools

Narrat

A cool Disco Elysium-inspired open source game engine that comes out of the box with a variety of subsystems designed to handle inventory, sprites, speaking characters, animations, etc. It is based on web technologies and is very extensible if you have JS and / or Vue knowledge. A dedicated editor might come along in the future, but for now all development has to be done in a code editing app such as Visual Studio Code. It also lets you live test and debug your game in the middle of editing it.

LÖVE

Also commonly called "Love2d".
A lua-based 2d framework that is accessible but still powerful.

Obsidian

The general purpose notes app I like to use. Has the flexibility of markdown while still allowing you to include all the multimedia content you'd like. Its most popular plugin (Excalidraw for Obsidian) lets you draw diagrams, lay out your content and embed any type of notes on a visual canvas, which is basically an enriched version of Miro if you don't need the collaboration aspect of it.

Affinity Photo

Tried Krita for drawing small simple visual assets, but it was too powerful for both my skills and needs. Affinity Photo is a one-time payment of 60$ and a great middle between the powerhouse that is Photoshop and the weaker (but great in a pinch!) Photopea. Has a bunch of small quality of life tweaks I thoroughly enjoy, but can have some very benign bugs at time.

Asset Forge

A basic 3D builder that comes with a variety of elementary blocks that you can dispose and apply simple modifications to very easily. Supports importing 3rd party models, great for building simple scenes if, like me, you have absolutely no 3D skills.

Graphviz

A cool diagram generator that can use several algorithms to organize and display elements and their relationships in a visually appealing manner, no matter how complex they are. Quite rich in features if you bother learning its syntax, and very useful to check and amend the logic behind your puzzles. I recommend using edotor and its live preview.