Field Notes is where the workshop gets written down. Every game on this site is designed, written, illustrated and coded in one place, and a lot of what makes that work is invisible in the finished thing — the rule that got cut, the simulation that proved a stake was unwinnable, the reason a frontier town refuses to sell you a doctor.

These are the notes from that bench. Some are about design: how an encounter deck is built so no choice is obviously correct, how difficulty can be made hard without being unfair, why information turned out to be the only resource in a survival game worth giving away free. Some are about the engineering: a chess search that had to be fast enough for a five-year-old phone, a pool table that provably cannot let a ball pass through another one, a one-button flyer whose obstacle field always contains a line you could have flown.

They are written for anyone curious about how small games actually get made, and they assume no particular technical background — where a piece needs a number to make its point, the number is explained on the way past.

The writing

• Designing an encounter deck where no choice is obviously correct

  A trail game is a deck of small decisions. Here is the rule that governs every card in it, and the audit that catches the ones that break it.

  Design · 7 min read

• Three rules for making a game hard without letting it cheat

  Nothing may counteract itself. Hard must be provably solvable. The trail sets a tempo — it does not hunt you. Everything else in the design answers to those three.

  Design · 6 min read

• Four hundred thousand runs: measuring whether a game is fair

  You cannot playtest a survival game into balance by hand. So five bots play it four hundred thousand times, and the results overturn most of what I believed about my own design.

  Engineering · 7 min read

• Writing forty words that have to carry a decision

  An encounter card gets a speaker, three lines and two labels. It has to establish a situation, imply a cost, and stay out of the way. Here is what that constrains.

  Writing · 7 min read

• The town that cannot sell you a doctor

  Two of my own design rules contradicted each other, and a frontier general store was where they finally met. Fixing it meant deciding what a town is allowed to be.

  Design · 6 min read

• News is the only free thing in the game

  Every other mechanic takes something. Information gives, costs nothing, and turns a slow decline into a race to a specific place by a specific day.

  Design · 6 min read

• Hiring people instead of buying gear

  A party roster is a shop where the goods argue back. Designing ten of them meant working out what you are actually paying for when you hire somebody.

  Design · 6 min read

• The art that draws itself

  Most of what you see in the trail game costs nothing to make, because it is not a picture. It is five layers of code pretending to be distance.

  Art · 6 min read

• Painting a game cover with nothing but silhouettes

  Sixteen cover images, one Python script, no illustrator. The technique is a graded sky, a light source, some black shapes and a lot of fog.

  Art · 6 min read

• Building the classics from scratch, one engineering problem at a time

  Chess, pool, a sliding puzzle, a one-button flyer. The rules are public domain; the hard part is never the rules.

  Engineering · 9 min read

• The guaranteed line: making an endless game hard without making it unfair

  Two one-button games, one rule — the obstacle field must always contain a route you could have taken. Generate the route first, then fill in the danger.

  Engineering · 5 min read

• One file per game, and no build step

  Every game here is a single HTML file with its own copy of everything. That is a deliberate choice, and it has cost me exactly one thing.

  Engineering · 6 min read