Game Mechanics Design

Use this skill to turn a desired player experience into a small, coherent, testable set of mechanics. Do not begin with a genre feature checklist. Begin with the player's repeated decisions and the evidence needed to determine whether those decisions produce the intended experience.

Core Principles

• Treat player motivations as hypotheses, not fixed personality labels.
• Prefer a few mechanics with strong interactions over many isolated features.
• Make important options legible, genuinely distinct, and consequential.
• Build challenge from learned skills and understandable rules, not hidden exceptions.
• Add progression, rewards, and currencies only when they strengthen the play itself.
• Teach by arranging safe opportunities to act, observe, retry, and later combine skills.
• Protect player time. Failure should teach, and repetition should have a clear purpose.

Workflow

1. Inspect the Current Game

Before proposing changes: