Cheat codes as a development tool
Twenty three cheat codes you type into the chat box, a commander who insults you for using them, and a hidden one that exists purely to film the game.
8 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Tag
game-design
Development posts tagged game-design. Tags cut across the categories, so this pulls together work on the same subject from different parts of the game.
21 posts · page 2 of 2
Putting a dungeon crawler inside an RTS
One hero, no base, no economy, and a door you cannot see past. Four things a strategy game quietly assumes had to be taken apart to make that work.
10 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Designing a counter system players can read
Twelve damage types against eight armours is ninety six numbers, and no player reads ninety six numbers mid-fight. Half of them do nothing, on purpose.
7 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Designing heroes with no dead time
One rule shaped every hero in the game: the player should always have a useful button to press. Four-ability kits failed it, so every kit went to six.
10 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Loot, gear and a gambling den
A Kobold Digger drops a healing potion 6.4% of the time. Every drop chance in the game is a real number you can look up, not a designer's feeling.
9 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Filling the map with things worth fighting
Creep camps, mercenary buildings and hero shops: the parts of the map that belong to neither side, and why an RTS map without them has a hole in it.
10 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Rendering & GraphicsThe move to 3D
Rebuilding a 2D game in 3D
In April the camera stopped looking straight down. What a player got when a canvas RTS was rebuilt on three.js, and what the simulation never noticed.
7 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Designing a game in writing before code
The original design document describes a two-race game with two columns of stats. It shipped with nine factions, naval warfare and a review of its own weaknesses.
9 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Letting a language model command an army
A language model gives orders every 12.5 seconds while an autopilot handles the second-by-second work. Where the boundary sits, and what it costs to run.
11 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock