Craft·5 min read
The Honest Way to Build Bespoke Games Repeatedly
Every commission is the same engine and none of them is the same game. This is how that is true rather than a sales line.
◆ The journal
Notes from the
studio.
What a bespoke game costs, how a commission actually runs, and ideas for the occasions people most often build one for.
Craft·5 min read
Two of Our Games Contain No Sound Files at All
A tape screech, a sword clang, thunder rolling. No audio files involved in any of them.
Craft·6 min read
How the Computer Decides Its Move in Our Chess Game
Four difficulty levels, one engine. The hardest problem was not making it strong, it was making it lose convincingly.
Craft·5 min read
How a Hit Is Made to Feel Like a Hit
Nothing in a game actually collides. An impact is four cheap effects fired in the right order.
Craft·5 min read
What a Game Draws First, and Why the Order Matters
There is no scene. There is a list of drawing instructions, run back to front, sixty times a second.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Gets Its Colour Palette
A small palette is not a limitation left over from old hardware. It is what stops a player losing the character.
Craft·5 min read
Reading the Controls Properly
A game does not respond to a key being pressed. It asks, every frame, which keys are currently down. The difference is everything.
Craft·5 min read
Getting a Game's Volume Right
Every sound in our games passes through a single gain set to about a third. Everything else is decided against that.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Remembers Where You Got To
Our adventure game saves in one line. Deciding what belongs in that line took considerably longer.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Teaches You to Play It
If a game needs a page of instructions, the first level is wrong.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Knows You Hit the Ground
Two rectangles overlapping is the easy part. Deciding what to do about it is where platformers go wrong.
Craft·5 min read
How a Game Plays a Tune With No Music File
Happy Birthday, in our 60th birthday game, is twenty-five pairs of numbers. Not one byte of it is audio.
Craft·5 min read
How a Photograph Becomes a Character You Can Move
The likeness is the easy half. Making it stand on a floor and turn around convincingly is the rest.
Craft·4 min read
How Long Should a Custom Game Take to Finish?
The commonest mistake in a commissioned game is making it too long. Nobody has ever complained that a gift was too easy to finish.
Craft·5 min read
How Many Frames a Walk Cycle Actually Needs
Two frames is enough. Understanding why is the difference between spending an art budget well and spending it on animation nobody sees.
Craft·5 min read
What One Person Watching Can Tell You
The hardest part of playtesting is keeping your mouth shut. Everything useful happens in the silence.
Craft·5 min read
How to Make a Character Walk Without It Looking Wrong
Feet that skate, legs that race, a stride that changes tempo halfway across a room. One arithmetic mistake causes all three.
Craft·5 min read
Putting an Entire Game in One File
One file you can email. No install, no server, no broken image paths in five years' time.
Craft·6 min read
How We Built a Cassette Loading Screen
It counts to 48000 because that is what a 48K machine had. And while it performs, it is doing real work.
Craft·5 min read
Turning a Real Teddy Into a Playable Character
The hard part is not drawing the bear. It is deciding which of its repairs to keep.
Craft·5 min read
One Game, Playable by a Four-Year-Old and an Adult
A game for a four-year-old is not an easier game. It is a different set of five numbers, and one of them removes losing entirely.
Craft·5 min read
Parallax, and How a Painting Becomes a Place
Three ways to put a character into a painted scene. Only one of them is parallax, and choosing between them is a per-room decision.
Craft·4 min read
Pixel Art or Painted: Choosing a Style for a Commission
One of our games is 104KB of pixel art. Another is 20MB of painting. Neither choice was about taste.
Craft·5 min read
Proving a Game Is Finished, Rather Than Hoping
A build can compile, open, look perfect and be impossible to finish. Ours are tested by a machine that plays them.
Craft·5 min read
What a Game Loop Actually Is
Every game ever made is the same three lines. Everything else is detail.
Craft·5 min read
Sprite Sheets, and Why Ours Does Not Use One
The standard answer is to pack every frame into one big image. Our games do the opposite, and the reason is worth understanding.
Craft·5 min read
The One Variable That Runs the Whole Game
Our platformer has eight states and one variable holding which one it is in. Every bug we did not have is because of that.
Craft·5 min read
What Makes Somebody Open a Game Twice
The measure of a commissioned game is not whether it is finished. It is whether it is opened again in March.
Craft·6 min read
What Makes a Jump Feel Right
Every good platformer cheats in your favour. Here are the four places ours does it, and what each one is worth.
Craft·5 min read
What Actually Makes a Web Game Load Slowly
The code in our largest game is a rounding error. Everything you wait for is a picture.
Craft·4 min read
Does a Game Need a Way to Lose?
Our gentlest difficulty has no way to lose at all. That is a design position, not a compromise.
Craft·5 min read
Why Games Run at Sixty Frames a Second
Sixty is not about smoothness. It is about the gap between pressing a button and seeing something happen.
Craft·4 min read
Why the Same Sound Twice Sounds Wrong
Collect one coin and it is satisfying. Collect fifty identical coins and you turn the sound off.
Craft·5 min read
Why Game Artwork Gets Drawn Twice
The first version of every level we build is coloured rectangles. That is not a shortcut, it is the only order that works.
Craft·5 min read
Why Our Games Do Not Use Delta Time
The standard advice is to scale everything by frame time. We do the opposite, on purpose, and the reason is testing.
Craft·6 min read
Why One of Our Games Is 104KB and Another Is 20MB
Three of our games sit at 104KB, 3.3MB and 20MB. The difference is not quality. It is a decision made early about where the art comes from.
Craft·10 min read
How We Built a Painted London Out of 502 Pictures
Twelve tube stations, three lines and a flight to Cape Town, in one HTML file. The problems that had to be solved, in the order they turned up.