Game craft

Classes in making games, taught backwards — from the bugs. We build the games on this site ourselves, we get things wrong constantly, and each mistake turns out to have a rule hiding behind it. These are those rules, with the mistakes left in.

Who these are for. Anyone. Class 1 assumes you have never opened a 3D program. There is no code to install and nothing to buy — every idea has a picture, or something you can drag.

Why they are organised by topic and not by game. Because the strongest evidence we have is that the same mistake keeps happening in different games. Steering that came out backwards shipped in three of ours before we understood why. One class about that is worth three changelogs.

The classes

Why your 3D character looks wrong

Blob faces, backwards knees, skating feet, and a body that folded into a pile. Six real bugs and the rule each one taught us — with five things you can drag.

Ready · 25 min

Testing a game you can see

Our tests were green while four buttons did nothing at all. Why a test that drives the game directly proves less than nothing, and why steering came out backwards in three games running.

Planned

Bots that don't walk into walls

Fifteen of our forty-seven paths went straight through a building, and the map test stayed green throughout — because it only ever checked the places, never the routes between them.

Planned

Making it feel good

Screen shake, slow motion, confetti and knowing when to stop. Eight seconds of replay is right; sixteen is far too long, and we measured it.

Planned

Where the examples come from

All of them are from games you can play on this site, free, in a browser — Emberfist, Wirecut, Phyloca, and the rest. Where a class shows a before-and-after, the “before” is a real screenshot of our own game being wrong.

Almost none of the underlying technique is ours, and none of it is secret. It is published work — GDC talks, open-source libraries, animation principles older than computers. What we add is the list of ways we managed to get it wrong, which is the part nobody writes down.