Mediavania
Game Development
Panthalassa Treats the Interface as the World
On knowledge, navigation, and a Portuguese point-and-click in the tradition of Silver Case.
Publication
Game Development
Fright Train: How WildArts Studio Turned Reloading a Gun Into the Core of Survival Horror
An interview-based breakdown of Fright Train's inventory, reload, and enemy-interaction systems, and how they generate tension without scripted scares.
Game Development
Tingus Goose: How a Rule-Less, Surreal Universe Became a Playable System
Brian explains how MasterTingus’s chaotic animation was reverse-engineered into a legible incremental game.
Game Development
Vampirium: 1997 and the Design Philosophy Behind Mike Bithell's Verb-Based Immersive Sim
How a production constraint turned into a language: inside Bithell Games' abstracted take on Deus Ex and Hitman.
Game Development
Feastopia: Why This Roguelite City Builder Almost Fell Apart at 18 Months
Inside White Star Studio’s redesign of Feastopia’s reward system — from three disconnected mechanics to one converged Grace Powers loop
Game Development
Heroes of the Aniverse: Designing Inside Someone Else's World
How Gummy Bunny Games Turned Technical Constraints Into Signature Mechanics.
Game Development
What Elflock Knows About Not Knowing
Inside a political adventure game in development built on the idea that information should never quite become certainty.
Game Development
Fortune & Glory: The Game That Told Its Creator What He Was Making
How a Game Boy Color platformer about Indiana Jones turned out, to its own creator's surprise, to be the Disney game he'd wanted since childhood.
Game Development
How A Heavy Morning Turns Player Frustration Into Design
This isn't a game about mental illness. It recruits the player's own frustration as its primary material.
Game Development
Eye of the Match Doesn’t Want a Realistic VAR — It Wants a More Powerful One
In conversation, André Cardoso explains why he abandoned VAR's real-world restraint the moment realism stopped serving the game.
RPG
No Blueprint: How Nocturne Rebuilt Two Genres at Once
A rhythm RPG's development, and the discipline of stripping inherited rules down to the parts that still hold.
Game Development
Crushed in Time: How Removing the Inventory Turns "Carry" Into "Distort"
Inside Draw Me A Pixel's point-and-click, a missing mechanic becomes the whole design.
Culture
Containment Before Identity: Reading the Systems of Into the Unwell
How systems are built, restrained, and only then given meaning.
Game Development
KUROHI: The Game That Could No Longer Be Anything Else
When everything locked into place.
Game Development
Movement as Design: Rethinking 3D Platformers Through BOBO AND THE CHEST OF NIGHTMARES
A conversation with David Ho on movement, design philosophy, and why restraint might be the most radical choice in modern platformers.
Game Development
From Novel to System: The Design of Septurian Might
The Attempt to Make Everything Serve the Story.