game design

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Games at the press of a button: The Rip-O-Bot (1989)
2 months ago
- Fukio Mitsuji (MTJ), designer of classic games like Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands, wrote a 1989 column warning about imitation games.
- He imagined a machine called the 'Rip-O-Bot' that could generate copycat games from a prompt, predicting an era where derivative work is automated.
- MTJ argued that the only lasting value for game designers is original ideas, as imitation can be done by robots.
- He compared the potential of a game-world 'Osamu Tezuka' to the need for human-driven creative originality.
- The column inspired the creation of Jinks, a tool focusing on novel ideas over boilerplate code, echoing MTJ's emphasis on ideas as the final weapon.
Beltrunner: Game Design Postmortem
2 months ago
- BELTRUNNER is a game built on the Jinks engine, a lightweight game-engine and interactive development environment, with ~1,300 lines of code.
- The game starts as a faithful Asteroids clone in Stage 1, then reveals a countdown race through numbered gates, blending familiar mechanics with new objectives.
- Design philosophy: teach the chassis first (Asteroids movement), then recontextualise it into a timed race where time is the only resource.
- Sixteen waves (4 acts of 4) follow a 'Nintendo Way' structure: each act introduces a new gate behavior (elliptical, directional, spinning, combined) and lets it bed in over multiple waves.
- Gameplay is deterministic: every random element uses a single seeded stream, making layouts learnable and fair for replays and tuning.
- Discoverable secrets include a hidden 'clover' rock sequence (inspired by Bomb Jack) that rewards players with a jackpot power-up, and an unlockable Asteroids ancestor in attract mode.
- Power-ups are collectible tokens in the field (Pang-style): TIME, INVINCIBLE, STOP, EXTRA, and WARP, each with specific effects and strategic use.
- The game forced system improvements: better vector graphics, real torus wrapping, polygon and ellipse colliders, and elastic deflection physics.
- Platform-agnostic core runs on multiple systems (Linux, Wii, Dreamcast, etc.) with the same code; only the shell changes.
- The game ends after 16 waves, with high scores tied to the economy, and attract mode continuously simulates the world.
Rohit Chess
2 months ago
- A 7-year-old created a new chess-like game with unique piece movements: front lines move like a king, large circles move like a bishop diagonally, and a spiral piece (the king to be checkmated) moves like a queen.
- The user described the game to the AI model o1-pro, which generated a webgame version of it.
- The game tends to be drawish because all pieces are powerful, making it easy to trade pieces and reach a stalemate, but it is easy to make a mistake against a high-depth AI.
Constraints are the Point
2 months ago
- LLMs in game characters are a massive distraction from what makes game characters work.
- Game characters are designed with specific narrative functions, not as chatbots.
- The best game dialogue is efficient, precise, and crafted to serve the player experience.
- LLM-powered NPCs are boring, generating endless word salad with no emotional impact.
- Players want authentic characters that enhance the core experience, not infinite filler.
- Limitations of traditional dialogue are features that force better writing and character distillation.
- Storylets and saliency systems offer better alternatives for responsive characters without sacrificing narrative control.
- LLM-powered NPCs create an illusion of depth but flatten the experience, making dialogue meaningless.
- Infinite content leads to boredom; crafted, limited dialogue carries more significance.
Juice – non-essential visual, audio, and haptic effects to enhance UX
2 months ago
- Juice refers to non-essential visual, audio, and haptic effects that enhance user experience, such as sound effects in games like Mario.
- Juice can teach users, make interfaces feel alive, improve responsiveness and reward, and strengthen emotional connections, making experiences memorable.
- Game Feel is the tactile sensation from manipulating a digital agent, achieved through juicing, e.g., Mario's nuanced movements and sounds.
- The pane of glass in interfaces and muted input devices create obstacles, compensated by redundant techniques like multiple animations and sounds.
- In non-game software, excessive juice can degrade UX; it should suit the intended purpose, focusing on mundane tasks over rare events.
- Prioritize juicing frequent, routine actions (e.g., moment-to-moment gameplay) rather than rare events like completing onboarding.
- Design interfaces as toys first for fun and playful exploration, then build games; this foundation is key to great user feel.
- Emotional requirements matter; juicing can celebrate achievements (e.g., habit-tracking checkbox) by acknowledging their symbolic meaning.
- Software with soul fulfills emotional needs, contrasting with soulless, functional-only designs like hospitals or minimal interfaces.
- Juice adds soul but is often absent due to underestimating emotions; it's essential for human-centric design, not just function.
- Create soul by asking how users should feel, drawing inspiration from art and media, and using emotional models like the Superhuman app.
- Examples include GitHub chat easter eggs, D&D Beyond 3D dice, Firewatch parallax scrolling, and multiteam software that uses juiced setup screens.
- Tweening (ease-in/out) and FLIP animation techniques juice transitions, making UI changes intuitive and less jarring.
- Call of Duty uses loading screens for non-intrusive teaching, while Half-Life scripts sequences for tension, teaching, and player acknowledgment.
- Game of Thrones' juiced title sequence helps viewers track locations and events, improving engagement.
- Amazon Prime Video can juice pause screens with actor info, recaps, or clickable lore to deepen user connection.
- Other techniques include juicing empty states, particles, screen shake, lush animations, physics-based objects, and freeze frames.
League of Legends designer shares game design field manual
2 months ago
- Players learn developers' values from game systems, not patch notes or announcements.
- Every system (scoreboards, ranked queues, crafting) makes a rhetorical statement about what matters.
- Players intensely audit and datamine systems; contradictions between visible and real data are perceived as lies.
- Player revolts (e.g., solo queue removal, tap-strafing, battle pass changes) show they hear and reject system messages.
- Game feel and system governance are a continuum, covered across seven timescales from 33ms to 7 years.
- The site is structured by timescale: game feel, UX, onboarding, competitive systems, metagame, social systems, live ops.
- Methodology also applies to AI engineering, where similar problems of onboarding, trust, feedback, and gaming arise.
Those Who Wear Red
2 months ago
- The creator developed a puzzle game using PuzzleScript, combining avoidance mechanics with Sokoban-style box-pushing.
- The game includes 10-15 levels exploring these mechanics, with a new idea introduced at level 20, and music composed in CLAVIER-36.
- The creator adjusted guard movement rules based on player behavior and learned that players often find unintended solutions.
- The puzzles are designed to express core ideas, but difficulty varies widely among players; some find certain puzzles easy, others struggle.
- The design principle of minimizing components can oversimplify levels, so the creator learned to leave room for player mistakes.
Why space games still struggle with the scale of the universe
2 months ago
- Space games struggle to depict the realistic scale of the universe due to its vastness, such as the 93 billion light-year observable universe and 100,000 light-year Milky Way.
- Game developers use techniques like level-of-detail scaling, procedural generation, and travel compression (e.g., jump gates, time acceleration) to balance realism with playability.
- In games like X4: Foundations, developers create dense populated areas and empty frontier regions to convey space's emptiness while avoiding boredom during travel.
- Elite Dangerous features a 1:1 scale Milky Way with 400 billion star systems, using Stellar Forge for procedural generation, but only a tiny fraction has been explored.
- Travel in space games involves tiered systems (e.g., Supercruise, Hyperspace) and resource management (fuel, heat) to engage players during long journeys.
- Asteroids in space are typically far apart, making accidental collisions unlikely, contrary to common media portrayals.
- The core challenge is balancing fun gameplay with realism, as simulating true cosmic scales exceeds current hardware and human comprehension.

game design

Games at the press of a button: The Rip-O-Bot (1989)

Beltrunner: Game Design Postmortem

Rohit Chess

Constraints are the Point

Juice – non-essential visual, audio, and haptic effects to enhance UX

League of Legends designer shares game design field manual

Those Who Wear Red

Why space games still struggle with the scale of the universe