game-design

Polygon 评测评述了 Jonathan Blow 工作室 Thekla 的全新 500 小时级开放世界解谜游戏《Order of the Sinking Star》,该作将多款经典 Sokoban 风格解谜游戏的机制重新融合,构成一个庞大而复杂的谜题宇宙。

Gwern publishes a full design document for Samon, a zen garden raking puzzle, turning a 2023 sketch into a complete design with solvers, level generation, a deductive grader, and a playable prototype with all code and data released.

2DWillNeverDie is a website offering tutorials, articles, and galleries focused on 2D art and design, maintained by Kiwi from 2009 to 2019.

A 1996 puzzle document for the video game Grim Fandango, likely detailing game puzzles or design elements.

The article introduces Game Designer Assistant, an AI agent that helps transform raw game ideas into pressure-tested designs by brainstorming, stress-testing, and generating studio-ready documents.

A quote from Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, discussing the shift from 'AI' to 'dwarf behavior' in game development and critiquing industry trends.

The article explores the unique design and lasting impact of Sid Meier's 1987 game 'Pirates!', discussing its unconventional mechanics and genre-defying nature.

StateFlow introduces a state-centric framework for generative previsualization, using a persistent 3D world state to support iterative, controllable scene and camera editing for film and game design.

An article discussing how to design difficulty curves in games, using the 'difficulty saw' concept of introducing new mechanics with their own curves rather than a continuous upward slope.

A blog post examining a 1989 GAMEST column by game designer Fukio Mitsuji (MTJ), who satirically envisioned a 'Rip-O-Bot' that could auto-generate copycat games by randomly assembling existing elements, eerily foreshadowing modern generative AI tools.

A League of Legends designer shares a comprehensive manual on game systems design, arguing that systems themselves communicate values to players, drawing on experience from Riot, Treyarch, and Respawn.

Google AI Devs showcases a multi-agent system using Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite to iteratively design and verify puzzle challenges in real time based on live player actions.

The article critiques AI-generated game worlds, arguing that while demos like Google Genie 3 are visually impressive, they lack the thoughtful design found in handcrafted games, making them hollow for extended play.

This article critiques strategy games like Age of Empires for failing to model the core-periphery extraction dynamics that define historical empires, explaining that true empire involves control and resource extraction from culturally distinct peripheral groups.

This paper introduces a dataset for monster-level prediction in Pathfinder Second Edition and compares machine learning models for ordinal regression, showing tree-based ensembles achieve near-perfect ranking accuracy.

Discusses Google Genie 3's ability to generate playable 3D game worlds from text prompts and its potential impact on level designers, questioning whether AI can replicate the nuanced craft of manual level design.

This survey paper defines AI-native games as those where runtime generative AI is constitutive of the core game loop, proposes a dual-axis G/N taxonomy, analyzes 53 games, and provides a roadmap for controllable generation, multimodal systems, and AI safety in game design.

The article discusses the struggling state of Bungie's extraction shooter Marathon ahead of its second season, which resets all player progress and offers a chance for the studio to reverse the game's declining player numbers and secure its future after ending Destiny 2 development.

This paper introduces Quantum Frog, a two-player cooperative game with a quantized-time mechanic, and uses reinforcement learning to analyze difficulty scaling, optimal strategies, and emergent cooperation between agents.

The author reflects on his experience with a new AI native RPG beta from the makers of AI Dungeon, identifying design challenges where AI-generated immersion breaks down during combat and system legibility, and calls for new design principles for AI-native games.