The Craft · Game design
What makes a game worth playing?
A working program gives us something to play. The rules, choices, controls and feedback shape the experience. The Craft explores how to make those decisions, try them out and understand what changes.
Start with a question from a game you are making, or try the paper game below. You do not need to complete Foundations, choose a computer or know a programming language.
Try changing one rule ↓Current material
Explore the module outlines
Maths for Games and Game Feel currently have outlines, rather than lesson sequences. They show the topics being developed; there are no completed Craft units to work through yet.
- Outline
Maths for Games
How do we describe position, movement, direction, distance and chance? The current outline explores numerical techniques and their costs on a machine.
Read the outline → - Outline
Game Feel
How does a game show that an action counted, give a player time to recover, or prevent an accidental restart? Explore timing, controls and feedback.
Read the outline →
Try it on paper · Two players
Change one rule. Play again.
Put seven counters between you. Coins or small scraps of paper will do. Take turns removing one or two counters. Whoever takes the last counter wins.
- Play a round. Before each turn, say what you expect your choice to leave for the other player.
- Change the ending. This time, whoever takes the last counter loses. Keep everything else the same.
- Compare. Did a useful move become a poor one? Was there a point when one player could force the result, whatever the other chose?
Try a different starting number next. Change only that number, so you can tell which difference affected play. Swap who starts and compare again.
Planned coverage
Questions The Craft will explore
These are areas we intend to develop, not additional published modules. Paper experiments, diagrams and pseudocode will let us explore the design before choosing how to implement it.
Rules and decisions
What can the player do? What makes one choice different from another? Explore goals, resources, rewards and consequences.
Movement and time
Where can things move, and when? Explore boundaries, collisions, turns, rhythm and pressure.
Controls and feedback
Can the player tell what happened? Explore responsiveness, readable graphics, animation, sound and alternatives to colour-only cues.
Opponents and uncertainty
What should an opponent notice and decide? Explore behaviour, warning, predictability and chance. Game AI means decisions for game entities; machine learning is not a prerequisite.
Challenge and progression
How does the player learn, recover and try something harder? Explore difficulty, encounters, failure and retrying.
Testing and finishing
Does the game produce the experience we intended? Observe someone playing, change one thing and compare. Choose a scope we can finish.
Take an idea into a game
The system tracks guide you through building games in a particular language and machine. They explain the immediate design choice as you build; The Craft will give those questions room for deeper experiments and alternatives.
For programming concepts, explore Foundations. For concrete techniques to adapt, browse the Pattern Library and check each example’s language, requirements and limitations. A rule can transfer between games even when its implementation needs to change.