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Featured post
How a Super Smash Bros. Fighter is Designed
Every Smash fighter is built from one sentence of theme, then given stats, moves, tradeoffs, and animation clear enough to read at a glance without losing the character underneath.
Read featured postMost referenced
The essays the other 147 link back to most.
What Makes a Good Puzzle?
Firm rules first. Then a contradiction built out of those rules. Then a realization the player can resolve, and carry into the next room.
What Makes Good AI?
Enemies feel smart when they are legible, consistent, and generous in ways you never notice. Good AI is built around the player experience, not around raw intelligence.
How Stealth Game Guards See and Hear - School of Stealth Part 1
Guards run on simulated sight and hearing. How much of that machinery you show the player decides whether stealth feels tense or tactical.
What's the Point of Prototyping?
A prototype is a small, disposable build made to settle one uncertain question while being wrong is still cheap, rather than a rough draft of the finished game.
How to find amazing game ideas
Good game ideas rarely arrive finished. Most of them start as a seed, and they only become worth building once they have a player action, a hook, an anchor, and a prototype.
Secrets of Game Feel and Juice
Game feel is decided in the second-to-second action. Movement, impact, sound, camera, and feedback are what make a game feel alive under your hands.
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How a Super Smash Bros. Fighter is Designed
Every Smash fighter is built from one sentence of theme, then given stats, moves, tradeoffs, and animation clear enough to read at a glance without losing the character underneath.
14 min readWhat Makes Good AI?
Enemies feel smart when they are legible, consistent, and generous in ways you never notice. Good AI is built around the player experience, not around raw intelligence.
10 min readWhat Makes a Good Puzzle?
Firm rules first. Then a contradiction built out of those rules. Then a realization the player can resolve, and carry into the next room.
15 min readHow Stealth Game Guards See and Hear - School of Stealth Part 1
Guards run on simulated sight and hearing. How much of that machinery you show the player decides whether stealth feels tense or tactical.
8 min readThe Challenge of Cameras
A camera is more than a viewpoint. It sets what the player can read, how near they feel to the character, and whether the action still supports the experience you meant to build.
9 min readHow Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves
Given a safe, reliable route to victory, players will take it, even when that route flattens the game. Good design makes the exciting route the attractive one, so the version worth playing is also the version that pays.
11 min readHow to Keep Players Engaged (Without Being Evil)
Holding a player is not the same as hooking one. Rhythm, curiosity, visible progress, and a fair challenge curve can make a game hard to walk away from without any manipulative retention machinery underneath.
18 min readThe Games That Designed Themselves
Many great games were never designed on paper. They were discovered, when someone built a rough version, noticed the part that was fun, and chased it.
7 min readHow Level Design Can Tell a Story
Rooms, routes, props, and light carry story. How level design explains a world, sets a mood, and casts the player in a role.
14 min readWhy Does Celeste Feel So Good to Play?
A breakdown of the run curves, jump shape, camera, dash, feedback and hidden forgiveness that make Celeste feel precise instead of punishing.
14 min readWhat Makes a Good Detective Game?
Detective games work when the player notices, connects, and proves the answer, instead of picking the truth off a list the interface offers.
10 min readWhat Makes a Game Feel Mysterious?
Mystery is the gap between what a player can explain and what they cannot, and games are special because players get to close that gap themselves.
16 min readHow Games Use Feedback Loops
Positive and negative feedback loops decide whether a lead snowballs, a loss spirals, or a game corrects itself before the ending is settled.
14 min readHow Games Do Health
Health is a design tool, not a failure meter. How a game takes damage away and hands it back decides whether players retreat, explore, or charge in.
8 min readThe World Design of Hollow Knight | Boss Keys
Hollow Knight makes Hallownest a kingdom you can learn and misplace yourself in, because it opens many directions at once, buries things worth finding, and lets curiosity do the navigating.
16 min readCan We Make Talking as Much Fun as Shooting?
Speech checks usually exist to delete a fight. Talking gets interesting when it asks you to read people, spend what you have learned, and risk the wrong word.
9 min readControllers Control Everything
The device in the player’s hands is a design decision, not a delivery detail. It sets which actions feel natural, which genres crowd a platform, and how much room is left for a control scheme nobody has tried yet.
9 min readClockwork Games and Time Loops
In most games the world holds still until you act. Clockwork games keep events moving on a schedule, so when you show up becomes a design decision.
12 min readHow Game Designers Solved These 11 Problems
Most of design is diagnosis: naming the actual problem, trying fixes fast, and letting play decide whether the fix worked.
12 min readWhat Makes Celeste's Assist Mode Special
Celeste proves a demanding game can hand out powerful help without shaming the player or blurring what the intended climb is supposed to be.
14 min readHow to find amazing game ideas
Good game ideas rarely arrive finished. Most of them start as a seed, and they only become worth building once they have a player action, a hook, an anchor, and a prototype.
15 min readThree things that inspired me to finish my game
Three pushes made finishing possible: player reactions that proved the core worked, a small project taken all the way to done, and a compact game that showed the right scope.
15 min readSequence Breaking with Toki Tori 2
Toki Tori 2 gates its world with knowledge instead of keys, items, or new abilities, which turns skipping ahead into a legitimate way to explore.
8 min readDid I Complete My 30 Day Game Making Challenge?
Thirty days is enough to drag a game out of analysis paralysis, but only if the schedule protects focus, buys better tools, cuts scope early, and books real playtesting time.
11 min readWas Steam Next Fest Worth It?
The festival storefront is crowded and the submission process is unforgiving, but a hard public deadline, a rehearsal launch, and hundreds of independent notes still paid for the trouble.
14 min readThe Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword's Dungeon Design
Skyward Sword is padded, linear, and uneven. Its best temples still bring back an old Zelda strength: treating the whole building as the puzzle.
12 min readPlaying Your Super Mario Maker Levels
Tiny Mario Maker courses show what happens when players study the games they love and turn those lessons into designs of their own.
5 min readThis Psychological Trick Makes Rewards Backfire
Quests and prizes push players along. In games about curiosity, creativity, expression or mastery, the same nudge can flatten the play instead.
9 min read3 Lessons from a Real-time, Turn-based Game
Nova-111 mixes turn-based and real-time systems in one game. It shows how opposed genres can support each other, why some bugs are worth keeping, and what happens when a core mechanic is left optional.
6 min readSecrets of Game Feel and Juice
Game feel is decided in the second-to-second action. Movement, impact, sound, camera, and feedback are what make a game feel alive under your hands.
7 min readHow I got my demo ready for Steam Next Fest
A Next Fest demo has to do marketing, feedback, packaging and timing at once, and the work that decides how it lands happens before the festival opens.
7 min readDon't make this assumption about your players (Developing 10)
A designer knows every solution before the first player arrives. Tune difficulty around that knowledge and the result is friction, not challenge.
8 min readNintendo - Putting Play First
Nintendo designs the play first, then builds characters, worlds, music, and story around that one central interaction.
6 min readHow Jonathan Blow Designs a Puzzle
In Braid and The Witness, a puzzle starts as a rule, grows into a surprising consequence, and ends as one clear idea handed to the player.
6 min readA puzzle game where your tools are completely random
Mosa Lina fixes its levels and randomizes your tools every run, so solving a room becomes improvisation instead of pattern matching.
6 min readThe World Design of Banjo-Kazooie
A compact, readable world can beat a sequel that scales up every system it inherited.
8 min readThe Music of Breath of the Wild
Sparse piano, long stretches of silence, buried classic melodies, and a village theme that grows as you build it: how Hyrule gets its mood.
5 min readThe Tragedy of Halo 3: ODST
ODST wrapped a lonely investigation around bursts of playable memory. Its structure was unusually ambitious for a 2009 shooter, and it stopped just short of working.
7 min readThe Power of Video Game HUDs
A HUD is a design tool, not decoration. It decides what players notice, how confidently they act, and which mechanics a game can carry at all.
7 min readHow to Make an Indie Game Trailer
A good indie game trailer is neither a montage nor a feature list. It makes the hook obvious, shows how the game is actually played, and keeps building until it stops.
8 min readMaking Games Better for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Players
Subtitles are the start of auditory accessibility, not the whole of it. Captions have to be readable, sound has to be visible, sound-only puzzles need a second route, and the settings have to be reachable before the first line of dialogue.
8 min readHow Snake Pass Became a Platformer Without Jumping
Snake Pass wears the costume of a 3D platformer, then deletes the genre’s most familiar verb. Taking jumping away is what makes the game new.
8 min readWhat Comes Next After Analyzing Games
Years of studying game design lead to one obvious next move: build a very small game and find out which ideas survive a real project.
6 min readMaking Hitman 2's Best Level
The Finish Line packs a racetrack, a corporate fortress, and two very different targets into one stage. Here is how that kind of stealth level gets built.
9 min readWhat Made Psychonauts Special
Psychonauts is not remembered for having the tightest jump. It is remembered because every level rebuilds a character psychology as a place you can walk through.
6 min readHitman and the Art of Repetition
Replaying a Hitman level is not a punishment for failing. It is how a chaotic first attempt becomes a precise, planned assassination.
6 min readWhy You Probably Didn't Get Lost in Metroid Dread
Metroid Dread reads as a huge, open Metroidvania, yet its level design keeps steering you back onto the critical path without ever saying so.
8 min readWhat It's Like to Release a Game on Steam
An honest Steam launch retrospective: what sold, what the fees took, which bugs got fixed, what reviewers said, and which production mistakes cost the most.
11 min readThe Power of Invisible Choices
A menu is not the only way to hand a player a decision. Often the strongest choice is made with the verbs the player already has in hand.
9 min readThe Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Dungeon Design
The temples in Ocarina of Time are grand, vertical, and unforgettable as places. Look at how their locks, items, and central rooms are arranged and a more complicated picture appears.
8 min readMorality in the Mechanics
Karma meters flatten ethics. The sharpest moral design hides in combat, money, stress and survival systems the player is already using.
7 min readRedesigning Death
Dying does not have to mean a fade to black and a rewind. It can rebuild the level, promote an enemy, cost you something real, or move the story forward.
7 min readThe Secret of Mario's Jump (and other Versatile Verbs)
One button is not what makes the jump great. What makes it great is that the same verb produces wildly different outcomes depending on timing, speed, and what came before it.
9 min readThe Rise of the Systemic Game
Systemic games get their power from objects, characters, environments, and rules that can act on each other, producing plans and accidents no designer ever scripted.
9 min readHow Baba Is You Makes Brain Busting Puzzles
Baba Is You hands you a language for rewriting its own rules, then uses tight restrictions to walk you into the one insight that looks impossible.
9 min readShovel Knight's Signature Moves
Four playable knights, four very different verbs. Shovel Knight shows how much of a platformer a single signature move can carry, and where the difficulty goes when that move changes.
10 min readWhy Metro Exodus is so Immersive
Metro Exodus earns the word immersive through concrete design calls: physical menus, scavenged upgrades, gear you maintain, thin supplies, an empty map, and people who notice what you did.
10 min readWhat's the Point of Prototyping?
A prototype is a small, disposable build made to settle one uncertain question while being wrong is still cheap, rather than a rough draft of the finished game.
10 min readHow The Forgotten City Creates The Perfect Mystery
The Forgotten City hands you a whole city to investigate and still keeps you moving. Freedom without paralysis, leads that never dead-end, and reveals that arrive in the order that keeps the mystery alive.
10 min readHow AM2R and Samus Returns remade Metroid 2
Both remakes of Metroid 2 sand down its rough edges. The harder design question is whether the sanding also removes the dread the original ran on.
12 min readWhat Makes a Good Combat System?
Strong combat runs on choices. Where to stand, who to hit first, which move fits the moment, when to commit, and how to answer the attack coming back at you.
12 min readThe Genius AI Behind The Sims
Needs, scored options, tuned curves, and a refusal to simulate everything are what make the households of The Sims read as living people rather than machinery.
13 min readBlue Prince: Can a random puzzle game actually work?
Blue Prince draws its mystery and its novelty from a mansion that is different every day. That same randomness collides with the tight clue-to-solution loop puzzle games are usually built on.
10 min readThe Best Games from the 2021 Game Jam
Joined Together was the 2021 jam theme, and it produced puzzle boxes, arena battlers, platformers, factories, constellations, and one escape powered by a stuck tongue.
13 min readValve's Secret Weapon
Valve runs playtests as a design engine: start early, repeat weekly, watch without helping, pick the right testers, and read every result against a clear goal.
12 min readThe World Design of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Its castle runs in every direction, which is why Symphony of the Night still thrills. The trouble is that the first half is open and closed at once.
11 min readThe Design of Dead Space - Part 2
Dead Space 2 improves almost every system it touches. The trouble is that each improvement pushes the series a little further from the quiet dread of the first game.
11 min readThe Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening's Dungeon Design
Every dungeon in Link's Awakening is a machine made of keys and locks, and the game keeps changing what counts as a key: a small key, a boss key, an item, a switch, a heavy metal ball.
10 min readWhy We Remember Bioshock's Fort Frolic
Fort Frolic sticks with players because one artist authors the entire district. Exploration, combat, photography, and even mercy all become part of Sander Cohen's show.
9 min readThe Genius of Prey's Gloo Cannon
One odd adhesive gun carries combat, exploration, hazard control, and improvisation in Prey, which is exactly why it stands for the game's promise that you choose your own approach.
9 min readHow I Make Puzzles for My Indie Magnet Game
Making puzzles got dramatically easier once the daily task stopped being "invent something clever" and turned into a systematic search across mechanic pairings, constraints, and holes in the progression.
9 min readIs Until Dawn a Good Horror Movie?
Until Dawn clicks once you stop trying to win the story and start directing it, choosing who the slasher night rewards and who it punishes.
7 min readIco, and Design by Subtraction
Ico endures because almost everything that failed to serve the bond between Ico and Yorda was cut out of it.
6 min readAdaptive Soundtracks in Games
A game soundtrack can do more than swell during a fight. It can carry feedback, mark progress, report the player state, and make a world feel reactive.
7 min readThe One Thing You Need to Finish Your Game
A prototype tells you the game is fun. It does not tell you how to finish it. That takes a written plan of what ships, what gets cut, and what work remains.
9 min readWhy Capcom is the King of Remakes
Capcom keeps the sensation of the original Resident Evil games and rebuilds almost everything else around it. Here is why that approach works.
8 min readHow Event[0]'s AI Puzzle Assistant Works
Event[0] lets you type anything at a ship computer and get a reply that lands. The trick is tags, context, mood, tight scope, and a fiction built to absorb mistakes.
8 min readCommanding Shepard
Commander Shepard is neither an empty avatar nor a finished character. Mass Effect turns that middle ground into a long lesson in shared authorship.
16 min readA detective demo inspired by Geoguessr
Locator rebuilds the location-guessing format as deduction, using photographs, a planet map, a working journal, and answers it refuses to confirm too early.
4 min readThe Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess' Dungeon Design
Twilight Princess dungeons are full of personality and standout moments, yet most of them repeat one central-room layout underneath.
8 min readFinding the Fun in FPS Campaigns
Two shooters from 2016 answer the same question in opposite ways. Doom rebuilds the combat loop around aggression; Titanfall 2 rebuilds the campaign around pacing.
9 min readAre Lives Outdated Game Design?
Lives look like leftover arcade furniture. The useful question is what a life counter is for: raising the stakes, rewarding mastery, or just making failure hurt twice.
8 min readHow Overcooked's Kitchens Force You to Communicate
Most co-op games manufacture teamwork by handing players different powers or different information. Overcooked hands everyone the same tools and lets the level assign the roles instead.
8 min read5 Bits of Good Game Design from 2015
A year stuffed with remasters still produced new mechanics worth stealing: combat that pays for aggression, stealth that pays for mercy, two systems feeding each other, checkpoints as a resource, and time built in to do nothing.
6 min readHow Rockstar fit an entire city into PlayStation 2 memory
Liberty City felt continuous on a console with 32 MB of memory. No single miracle made that work. It took a stack of streaming, detail and layout decisions that all had to hold at once.
9 min read10 Game Design Lessons from 10 Years of Analysis
The design lessons that survive a decade are principles, not rules. Mechanics are what the player actually feels, context decides whether a feature earns its place, and nothing is settled until somebody plays it.
7 min readIs The Swindle the First Great Heist Game?
Punishing failure is only half of what The Swindle does. The rest is temptation: it nudges the player into greedy, risky jobs, and those are the jobs that turn into stories worth telling.
4 min readWhy do God of War's Characters Keep Spoiling Puzzles?
Hints exist to keep players from stalling, but a companion who solves the room in seconds takes away the exploring, the guessing, and the moment the answer finally lands.
5 min readHow Nintendo Solved Zelda's Open World Problem
Nintendo wanted total freedom in Hyrule and still needed players to reach the story. Landmarks, rewards, and terrain shape did the steering instead of a route.
5 min readSuper Mario 3D World's 4 Step Level Design
Super Mario 3D World throws new mechanics at you constantly, and it gets away with it because every stage gives one idea the same four-part arc.
5 min readThe Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks' Dungeon Design
The two DS Zelda games use the handheld inventively, yet their always-on dungeon maps tend to replace spatial reasoning with point-to-point walking.
8 min readDoes Spidey's Web-Swinging Make You Feel Like Spider-Man?
Speed, animation, and flow make Spider-Man's swinging feel like the movies from the first press of a trigger. That ease is a deliberate design choice, and it raises a question worth asking of any power fantasy: should feeling capable be given away, or won?
7 min readThe Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's Dungeon Design
Wind Waker's temples wear the shape of a classic Zelda dungeon, yet most of them walk the player to the next answer instead of asking them to remember a place, return to it, and read it again.
8 min readThe Final Steps Before Releasing a Game on Steam
Launch day is the smallest part of finishing a game. The real work is locking content, adding one last feature that fits, ranking bugs by severity, running QA again after every fix, cutting a release build, and finally letting go.
5 min readThe Two Types of Randomness in Game Design
Luck can add variety, drama, and risk, or it can make a game feel rigged. What separates the two is whether the dice fall before the player decides or after.
9 min readAnalyzing Mario to Master Super Mario Maker
The blank canvas in Super Mario Maker stops being intimidating once you treat it as an exercise. Take apart a few real Mario stages, name the patterns you find, then build one short level around a single clear idea.
9 min readCan Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom's UI Be Fixed?
Echoes of Wisdom hides its best ability behind a menu that hurts to use. Building five replacements shows how speed, analog input, discovery, and creative play pull against each other.
11 min readThe Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds' Dungeon Design
A Link Between Worlds hands the overworld back to the player, and its dungeons pay for that freedom. What comes back is classic lock-and-key navigation, carried on some visible compromises.
11 min readBreaking Down the Best World in Rayman Legends
Rayman Legends keeps one strong mechanic alive across a whole world instead of a single level. It varies it, combines it with everything else, then cashes it in during a fast finale.
7 min readThe Design of Dead Space - Part 3
Dead Space 3 is what a horror series looks like once it commits to chasing a wider action audience. A few systems get smoother, and the genre underneath them starts pulling the other way.
8 min readPoint and Click Puzzle Design
Moon logic is not a requirement of the adventure genre. A fair puzzle tells you what you want, leaves clues you can find, and answers a near-miss with something more useful than a shrug.
7 min readWhy is it so hard to make game design decisions? (Developing 3)
One magnet prototype was supposed to be a fast platformer. It kept turning itself into a puzzle game instead, and the way out of that stalemate was a deliberately small MVP with a deadline attached.
10 min readHow Her Story Turns Video Clips into Clues
Her Story is dressed up as a plain database search, yet every scattered interview clip is written and ordered so that your own curiosity does the detective work.
7 min readThe Legend of Zelda and Zelda II's Dungeon Design
Bosses, items, keys, locked doors, and tangled mazes all start here. The first two Zelda games also show exactly which of those rules the series had to rewrite.
9 min readHow to make a good platforming character (Developing 6)
A floaty prototype robot becomes a platforming character worth controlling, through movement tuning, a one-button throw, animation with personality, and accessibility options added early.
8 min readHow Cuphead's Bosses (Try to) Kill You
Every Cuphead boss attack exists to make you move. Learn the rule, spot the tell, react in the moment, and survive one more layer than last time.
8 min readThe Birth of the Japanese RPG
Trace the Japanese RPG back through Dragon Quest, Wizardry and Ultima, mainframe experiments, and Dungeons & Dragons, and you find a long chain of designers translating an older idea for a new machine and a new audience.
9 min readThe Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Seasons' Dungeon Design
Across 16 dungeons, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons keep bending one familiar loop: find the item, go back for the gates it opens, earn the boss key, reach the boss.
8 min readFollowing the Little Dotted Line
Waypoint trails make an open world legible, but they can also replace looking, listening, and working out a route with plain obedience.
7 min readRoguelikes, Persistency, and Progression
Random levels and repeated runs look alike across the genre. What separates a roguelike from a roguelite is whether anything survives your death, and that one choice decides what a loss costs you and what a win is worth.
7 min readThe World Design of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Echoes cuts the planet Aether into temple-sized regions you can hold in your head. The structure makes exploration lighter to carry, and then breaks its own rules in two places that are worth studying.
9 min readWhat Mirror's Edge Catalyst Should Have Learned From Burnout Paradise
Catalyst opened up its city, but Burnout Paradise shows that a sandbox only pays off when its events, routes, navigation, and mastery all run through the same streets.
7 min readMaking Ori and The Will of the Wisps' Best Level
The Windswept Wastes were assembled from sketches, prototypes, and a single expressive movement ability. Here is how that desert came together.
10 min readSuper Mario's Invisible Difficulty Settings
Mario almost never shows you a difficulty menu. The setting is hidden inside routes, prizes, assists, characters and optional goals, and you change it while you play.
12 min readPlaying Past Your Mistakes
Asking players not to reload never works. If you want them to keep going after a mistake, the systems have to make the setback survivable, reversible, or interesting enough to carry forward.
7 min readThe Best Games from the 2024 Game Jam
The standout entries did not decorate their games with size. They turned growing, shrinking, framing, nesting, and shifting dimensions into rules you play.
12 min readHow Jusant Makes Rock-Climbing More Immersive
Jusant earns its climbing by tying the controller to a pair of hands on the wall, then layering rope length, piton scarcity, route planning, and a clear sense of what the game is for.
9 min readThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's Dungeon Design
Instead of dungeons, Breath of the Wild gives you machines you can rotate, 120 shrines, and a castle you can climb. The ideas are strong; the execution wobbles.
11 min readCan we Improve Tutorials for Complex Games?
Strategy games, city builders and other deep genres tend to teach everything up front, before anyone is invested. Lessons land harder when they are spread out, framed as problems, and delivered through interfaces players already recognize.
11 min readThe 100 Games That Taught Me Game Design
Playing widely is still the cheapest design education there is. Here are 100 games, each one carrying a single clear lesson about mechanics, systems, structure, feedback, storytelling, or player expression.
17 min readHow To Combine Video Game Genres
A mash-up does not work because you poured two genres into the same game. It works when each genre has a job to do, both point at one focus, and each one makes the other stronger.
8 min readDownwell's Dual Purpose Design
Nearly every part of Downwell holds down two or three jobs at the same time. That overlap is where its speed, depth, risk, readability, and hard choices come from.
5 min readThe 3 Types of Detective Game
Casting the player as a detective is easy. The hard part is asking them to reason about clues, lies, and leads, then testing that reasoning without leaking the solution.
10 min readThe 4 "P"s of DOOM's Amazing Combat
A single fight in DOOM Eternal explains the whole combat loop. Priority, preference, preservation and position are four questions the arena asks at once, and it never stops asking them.
6 min readThe stuff no one tells you about game development (Developing 7)
Nobody sees the plumbing, but the plumbing sets your pace. Shared managers, saved settings, a progression structure, and a few editor tools are what move a brittle prototype into something you can keep building on.
7 min readDepth, Mastery, and Vanquish
Vanquish wears the costume of a cover shooter. Underneath it runs on the values that hold up every great action game: an easy surface, expressive depth, and a ceiling high enough to be worth climbing.
8 min readHow Accessible Were 2021's Games?
By 2021, accessibility options had become normal in big games. The harder work starts now: making those options reliable, deep, and genuinely usable by the players who need them.
11 min readHow To Think Like A Game Designer
Every designer borrows mechanics. The trouble starts when a borrowed rule is judged on what it does rather than on how it makes players act and feel.
8 min readWhat's The Point Of Hard Games, Anyway?
Difficulty is not a single dial. It is a set of separate design tools, and each one decides whether failure produces mastery, meaning, or the urge to quit.
7 min readWhat an AI 2D Game Asset Generator Actually Gives You
Generating a picture and producing a game asset are two different jobs. The gap between them is alpha edges, exact sizes, pivots, palette agreement, and whether the thing still reads at the size players see it.
10 min readAI 3D Game Asset Generators and the Topology Problem
A generated 3D model is a shape. A game asset is a shape plus a wireframe, a UV layout, a material, a scale, an origin, a collision hull and, if it moves, a skeleton. Only the first of those comes out of the box.
11 min readWhy generated game dialogue falls apart as a conversation
Generated dialogue reads fine line by line and collapses as a conversation. The missing pieces are state, stakes and memory. Barks are the honest sweet spot.
9 min readAn AI enemy generator gives you a silhouette, not a fight
An enemy is not a model plus a stat block. It is a behaviour the player can read and plan around. Generation gives you the silhouette; the fight is still yours to design.
8 min readCheap to generate a thousand game concepts, expensive to pick one
Concept generators are excellent at novel combinations and useless at judging which combination deserves months of work. The selection test is the whole job.
8 min readQuestions that separate one ai game maker from another
Every tool in this category advertises the same four things. Here are the questions that actually distinguish them, what each shape of tool is genuinely good at, and a test you can run in an afternoon.
10 min readWhat an ai game maker is worth in a 48 hour jam
A hackathon is a scope problem with a clock attached. Generation genuinely buys you hours in some places and quietly spends them in others, and knowing which is which decides whether you submit.
9 min readAI level generators versus classic procedural generation
Procedural generation is a rule system you tune and can trust to stay consistent. A model producing a level is a one-shot draft you must inspect. Both are useful, for different jobs.
9 min readProcedural Generation Only Works When Something Checks It
A generator that can produce an unplayable level will produce one, on someone else, on launch day. The rules that reject bad output are not plumbing. They are the design, written down.
8 min readWhat an AI quest generator actually gives you
A generated quest is an objective, a trigger and a reward hook. A memorable quest is a reason to care, a place it takes you, and a consequence you can see afterwards.
9 min readAI Sound Effect Generators and the Repetition Problem
Text-to-sound gives you one short clip at a time, and short clips are genuinely useful. The thing that determines whether your game sounds good is not the clip. It is what happens the fortieth time it plays.
9 min readWhy AI Sprite Generators Struggle With Animation
One generated sprite can be excellent. Eight generated frames of the same character walking will not be the same character. Animation is a coherence problem, and coherence is exactly what per-image generation does not have.
10 min readHow to judge a game you did not code
Knowing whether a game is any good is a player skill, not a programming one. Here is a method for reviewing your own project and turning the verdict into changes.
8 min readThe smallest plan that is actually useful
Most game plans are either too vague to act on or too long to read. The useful version is four short answers you can write in an afternoon and change on Friday.
9 min readThe honest state of ai game making in 2026
A survey with the hype removed: what ai game making genuinely does well in 2026, what it still cannot do, and what only looks like it changed.
12 min readWhat to build first in an open world
The instinct is to build the map. The right first thing is a hundred metres of ground you enjoy crossing, because everything else in an open world is built on top of the crossing.
10 min readWhen to stop prompting and start building
Asking for a change is so cheap that it is easy to keep asking long past the point where it helps. Here are the signals that the next useful move is to go and place things by hand.
8 min readWhy browser ai game makers hit a ceiling
A tab is the best on-ramp in software and a constrained place to finish a project. What browser tools genuinely do better, where the limit actually comes from, and how to decide which side of it you are on.
10 min readWhy your first AI-generated game is bad, and what to do about it
The first thing you build with AI usually works and is dull. That is not a tooling failure, and a better model will not fix it. It is a description problem, an averaging problem, and a judgement problem, and all three have concrete fixes.
10 min read