What Can the Player Actually Do
I remember sitting in a cramped dorm room at 3:00 AM, staring at a combat prototype that was technically “perfect.” The math was flawless, the frame data was tight, and the hitboxes were precise, but playing it felt like filling out tax forms. I had spent weeks obsessing over damage scaling when I should have…
Finding the Loop the Whole Game Sits on
I spent three months of my life building a combat system that felt like a masterpiece on paper, only to realize I’d accidentally designed a glorified chore simulator. I kept reading these high-level design blogs that talk about “synergistic engagement” and “reward optimization,” but they never mention the moment you realize your players aren’t actually…
Prototype the Fun Before You Build the Game
I spent six months building a complex, interconnected crafting system for my current project, only to realize during the first playtest that I hadn’t built a feature—I’d built a chore. I had polished the UI, balanced the math, and written the lore, all to discover that the core loop was fundamentally boring. Most people will…
Scoping a Game You Can Actually Finish Alone
I spent three months building a procedural weather system for my last project because I thought “immersion” was the only thing that mattered. I was wrong. I wasn’t building a game; I was just writing a very expensive, very broken sentence about rain that no one would ever actually notice. Most tutorials on how to…
Your First Game Should Be Embarrassingly Small
Stop looking for the “ultimate engine tutorial” or a massive, hundred-page design document that you’ll never actually finish. Most people think learning how to start designing a game means mastering complex math or learning how to code a physics engine from scratch, but that’s just a way to procrastinate on the hard part. I spent…